All You Need to Know on Punctuation Marks: Types and Use

Punctuation marks are like traffic signs, showing us the way through the text. Punctuation means a lot. Sometimes it can entirely change the meaning:

A woman, without her, man is nothing. - A woman without her man is nothing.

Let’s eat grandma! – Let’s eat, grandma!

Joking apart, the following are the most common cases of using different punctuation marks:

Comma

Comma is the most frequently used mark, and it serves different purposes, such as:

1. Separating elements in a series: He woke up early, went into the street and met a girl of his dreams.
2. Compound sentences (plus a coordinating conjunction – one of FANBOYS – for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so): It was raining for two days, so we decided to cancel our picnic.
3. Complex sentences (plus a subordinate conjunction and/ or a relative pronoun): The woman, who showed me the way to the church, was wearing a brown coat.
4. Setting off introductory elements: Fortunately, the boy’s Mom arrived on time.
5. Setting off parenthetical elements: Stuart, an undergraduate student of Harvard, suddenly decided to drop out college and go to India.
6. Setting off quoted elements: Freud said, "Time spent with cats is never wasted."

Full Stop (Period)

A full stop is used at the end of a sentence as well as in some other cases:

1. Command, polite request: Feel free to contact us in case of any questions. Would everyone who hasn’t received professor’s approval of a dissertation topic please visit the laboratory during office hours.
2. Indirect question: Jane asked if her father was already at home.
3. Abbreviations: It was 6 p.m. when Stuart finally arrived home.

The Question Mark

The question mark is used at the end of different kinds of questions:

1. Direct questions: Will you join me to visit a theatre?
2. Tag question: It’s your first time playing chess, isn’t it?
3. A question embedded within a statement: We’ll go to the seaside next year?

The Exclamation Mark

The exclamation mark makes the sentences emphatic:

1. An emphatic statement: I’ve asked you not to sing karaoke at night!
2. A command: I said shut up and listen to me!
3. An interjection: Oh! I see that he is happy to see us.

Colon

The colon is used before a list or an explanation. Before the colon should be used a clause that could be used by itself.

E.g. The actress played many interesting roles: Margaret Thatcher, Juliet, Snow White.

If the opening clause is very short, the list can start from a capital letter.

E.g. Remember: Use a colon to start an explanation or a list of items.

Semicolon

The semicolon is used to connect closely related independent clauses without using a conjunction:

E.g. Alice invited friends to her birthday; she was afraid of staying alone on this day.

The Dash

The dash is also referred to as a super comma. It is used to separate parenthetical elements, especially the ones which have other punctuation marks inside.

E.g. The greatest poets of the ancient times - Homer, Petrarch and Shakespeare - can’t leave indifferent even today’s readers.

The Ellipsis

The ellipsis is used to indicate a pause in the flow of the text or the omission of words in a quote. Thus, if you want to cite a long statement and want to omit some part of it, you may want to include an ellipsis instead.

Shakespeare said, "This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player … is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

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