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Punctuation

The period or full stop

The comma

Connecting clauses

Lists in a sentence

Separating lists of adjectives

Parenthetical phrases

Introductory phrases

Quotation marks

Using single quotation marks

The exclamation mark or exclamation point

The question mark

The colon

When to capitalise after a colon

The semicolon

The apostrophe

Making words plural using apostrophes

The hyphen

Dividing words at the end of a line

Using hyphens to create compound numbers

Using hyphens to avoid confusion

Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases

Using hyphens with prefixes

Using hyphens for position descriptions

The em and en dash

Parentheses

Brackets

The forward slash

To indicate choice between multiple options

For dates

Fractions

The ellipsis or dot dot dot

Punctuation

Punctuation is used to help you get your message across to your reader, whether you’re writing a story, poem or essay. When you write something using correct punctuation, it makes it a lot easier for your reader to navigate through your writing. Bad punctuation on the other hand, can make life difficult for your reader. Even if you’ve written a killer essay with some great ideas, bad punctuation can give the general impression that you don’t really know what you’re doing. So it’s best to learn how to punctuate correctly!

In this section, I’ll describe most of the punctuation marks and when, where, and how to use them.

Click here to move on to the next topic: The period or full stop