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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 to avoid confusion

Compare these two sentences:

John is a friendly-looking fellow.

This sentence means that John is a person who appears friendly to people who look at him. This is different to the meaning in this sentence:

John is a friendly looking fellow.

Here the sentence is saying that John is friendly, and that he is also looking for something (who knows what, the sentence doesn’t tell us).

These two sentences show how you can use a hyphen to clarify exactly what you mean in the sentence.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Using hyphens to join words together to form adjectival phrases