Free, easy to understand English
grammar and writing tutorial lessons

Click for Main Topic List

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

Using hyphens for position descriptions

Positional titles, either in your family or in an institution like the army, sometimes use hyphens. For instance:

Her mother-in-law is horrible to me!

If you want to form the plural of such a hyphenated word, you do so using the first part of the word, not the last part:

I’m sure that there are lots of charming mother-in-laws.
I’m sure that there are lots of charming mothers-in-law.

Click here to move on to the next topic: The em and en dash