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grammar and writing tutorial lessons

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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

Using single quotation marks

Single quotation marks can be used in these two situations:

When you want to highlight a word in a sentence as being ‘suspicious’ or probably not meaning what it usually does, you can surround it with single quotation marks. For instance, if I was talking about a friend who I know isn’t sick but who is claiming he is and taking the day off work:

I told Michelle that Ben is ‘sick’ and taking the day off work; she wasn’t impressed.

The other situation where you would use single quotation marks is when you’re emphasising a word in the sentence as being an important point or concept in the sentence (you could also use italics):

I read an interesting journal article the other day on the topic of society’s ‘moral degradation’.

Notice that I’m not mentioning the actual title of the article, otherwise I’d have to use double quotation marks:

I read an interesting journal article the other day called, "Moral degradation in today’s society."

Click here to move on to the next topic: The exclamation mark or exclamation point