Free, easy to understand English
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

When to capitalise after a colon

When you’ve got a simple list of items or dependent clauses, you usually don’t capitalise the first letter after the colon:

The recipe required four ingredients: butter, bread, eggs, and ham.

Also, if the quote that follows a colon is not a fully independent clause, we usually don’t capitalise it:

John said many things yesterday: ‘yikes’, ‘wow’, and ‘oohh’.

If you have an independent clause after a colon, capitalise the first letter. Do this whether it’s a quote or just a point like in this sentence:

I think I know why most people like Tyrannosaurus so much: It was one of the earliest discovered dinosaurs and was, until recently, the largest land carnivore that ever lived.

Click here to move on to the next topic: The semicolon