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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

The apostrophe

Apostrophes have several uses. The most common use is to make words possessive. You can use an apostrophe to change an awkwardly worded sentence into one that sounds a lot more fluent:

The tractor that Bob owns is red.

We can make the word ‘Bob’ possessive by adding an apostrophe and an ‘s’ after it and rewriting the sentence:

Bob’s tractor is red.

There are all sorts of rules for how to make words possessive, which are covered in the section on possessive nouns.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Making words plural using apostrophes