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Punctuation
Elementary Guidance
Author: Peter Wilson
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The simplest rule is SAY IT!
Essentially, punctuation is a guide to reading aloud. Each punctuation mark represents a pause, or a
tone of voice. If you are unclear about punctuation, read your text over aloud – or at least move your
lips. Where you think a reader should make a major pause (draw breath), use a full stop. Where you
think a reader should make a smaller pause, use a comma.
If you do this, you will rarely be wrong. You will not be using punctuation in a very sophisticated way,
but you’ll probably have made very few mistakes.
Sometimes, the use of reading aloud can help you decide whether you need a comma or not.
Warning: many academics disagree about commas. Where Dr X thinks a text
needs commas for clarity, Prof. Y may feel there should be fewer commas.
Some people use much more punctuation than others where they want to
make their meaning, or chain of argument, clearer. But a good deal of
punctuation is A MATTER OF TASTE. (It’s also a matter of style – of a writer’s
individual choice.)
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MORE SOPHISTICATED PUNCTUATION MARKS
A semi-colon (;) is a good example of more sophisticated punctuation: as its appearance suggests,
it is half way between a full stop and a comma. Use it when you write two separate sentences, know
they are separate and should have a full stop, but you’d like to keep them very closely linked. For
example:
In the 1960s, the USA was the world’s strongest nuclear power; the USSR
was not far behind.
South Korea is a democratic country with independent political parties; North
Korea is a one-party (communist) state.
A semi-colon can also be used as a separator in lists of longer items. Usually items in a list are
separated by commas. When we make a shopping list, for example, short items (simple names) are
separated by commas: milk, butter, eggs, tea, brown sugar etc. In academic writing, however, the
items may be quite long. For example:
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Among the most important causes of the Second World War were: the growing desire,
and indeed policy, of Hitler for increased lebensraum for the German people; the
growing fear and distrust of the democratic states for this and other manifestations of
Fascism; and the sympathy of the democratic nations for the plight of helpless
countries in the centre of Europe.
(Each of the ‘causes’ mentioned above is so long that the three of them together need the semi-colon
to make them easier to read. The semi-colon shows the structure of the sentence to the reader. Each
cause could be dealt with in a sentence of its own. Note that it is possible to use commas inside the
units.
Suggestion: if you find punctuation getting out of control, try to break your thoughts into separate
sentences. On the other hand, one way of sounding academic is to write in long sentences. So if you
feel in control, keep your thoughts together.)
A colon (:) is used to express a logical link between two sentences that should normally be separated
by a full stop. Think of it as having a meaning: ‘now I’d like to tell you some more about what I’ve just
said’. In its simplest form, this is an introduction to a list. The writer names a group and then, after a
colon, lists the members of the group; sometimes some examples rather than the whole membership.
We now turn to the developed nations: the US, the UK, France and Germany. (There are more than
four ‘developed nations’, but this assignment is only examining four.) There are several examples in
this guide: try to find them, and see how they are used.
In the UK, colons and semi-colons are never followed by an upper-case (aspiral) letter.
Dashes ( – ) and Brackets (()), with some uses of commas (,), are all types of parenthesis. The
thing to notice about these is that they come in pairs. If you use one, you must use two – unless
there is an over-riding need to use some other form of punctuation. The last one of a pair of
commas or dashes is over-ridden by the end of a sentence – use the full stop instead. (You must
always close brackets.) Two particular notes follow:
A dash is not the same as a hyphen – though they are the same key on a computer
keyboard. A hyphen comes inside compound words like double-edged and antinuclear. Don’t use spaces. A dash, on the other hand, comes between words. It is a
longer line than a hyphen, and should have a space before and after the horizontal
line – like this. (If Microsoft WORD messes up – as it sometimes does after corrections
– and gives you a symbol that is too short, use the Insert menu; go to Symbol;
choose Special characters and choose En-dash (the second on the list that Microsoft
offers you). Then press Insert and Close.)
With brackets, note that any full stop at the end goes with the sentence it closes. If
the sentence is wholly inside the brackets, then the full stop should come before the
closing bracket. (This rule looks like this.) If the bracket is inside a sentence, then the
full stop comes after the closing bracket (like this).
With quotation marks, the best guidance is to do roughly the same.
With commas, note that there is a difference between a defining and a non-defining relative clause
– to be technical. In general terms, it is to do with ‘which’ (and other ‘wh-’) clauses. (A clause is a subsentence, linked to another clause, in a sentence.) Briefly, if a ‘which’ clause tells you what the word is
talking about, or what it means, (a ‘defining relative clause’), you should have no commas. E.g. the
man who was in bed 6 has been discharged. (‘Which man?’ – the man in bed 6: the ‘which’ clause has
defined him.) If the ‘which’ clause is adding extra, less important details (a non-defining clause), there
should be a comma before and one after the clause. (It may help to think of it as a sort of junior
bracket.) E.g. the car, which was red, ran over his foot. (It doesn’t matter what colour it was – I’m only
adding a bit of description. I haven’t defined the car.)
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The question mark (?) is used at the end of a question. It shows the rising tone of a spoken question.
The exclamation mark (!) shows surprise in a speaker’s voice. Both of these should be followed by
capitals, as they are full stops with an extra mark above. You are recommended not to use either
questions or exclamations in academic work, so these will be rarely used outside quotations. The
‘three dots’ (…) or ellipsis mark is used to show omission of material from quotations, and the
square brackets [ ] show any material interpolated inside a quotation.
For a note on speech punctuation, see later.
3 GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION
Everyone has a knowledge of grammar. This is the deep knowledge we all have of the language
we speak. If you didn’t know grammar, this paper wouldn’t make sense to you; you couldn’t talk,
read or write English. What frightens most people about grammar is that they don’t have the
technical vocabulary to talk about it: their knowledge is implicit (‘natural’) rather than explicit
(‘learned’).
You have almost certainly been told that the end of a sentence must have a full stop, or have some
connective to the material round it. If you do have some technical knowledge, then it may help to
realise that a sentence, in formal academic English writing at any rate, should have at least a subject
and a main verb. That is also the definition of a clause. Simple sentences contain one clause.
Compound and complex sentences have more than one clause, and are characteristic of academic
writing. Compound sentences are the ones connected by and, but, or, or nor; complex sentences are
joined by subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns (wh- words), which often have a
meaning in expressing the logical relationship of the clauses they link, though this can be exaggerated.
Compound sentences
can look like this:
Point 1
and
Point 2,
but
Point 3
Complex sentences can look something like this:
[Subordinate Clause (e.g. If we now look at…)] + [Main Clause (e.g. ‘we see’)] + [Subordinate Clause
(e.g. ‘that punctuation is easy’)].
By connective we mean some way of linking two sentences. The commonest are conjunctions
(joining words) and relative pronouns (wh- words); but you can also use punctuation as links. (See
semi-colon, colon, and parenthesis above.) When you use a sentence conjunction (and, but, or, nor)
you should not use a full stop. When you use a subordinating conjunction (such as although,
because, in order to, since, etc.) you should use a comma or not, depending on how hard your
sentence is to read (how long it is).
One trip-up that catches many writers is this. However is not a joining word. (If you want the detail – it
is a sentence adverbial.) Use however after a full stop. In my view, therefore is the same – use it,
normally, to start a new sentence, not to link two separate sentences.
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A note on – or an example of – what happens in speech punctuation:
[To explain the following points to notice in punctuating speech, here is some grammar: ‘He said “Hi”.’
is a sentence: in the jargon, He is the Subject, said is the Verb and ‘Hi’ (including the inverted
commas) is the Object (it tells us what he said). Point 1): there is usually a comma between the He
said and the Object (There should never be a full stop between Subject and Verb or Verb and
Object.) Point 2): When he said follows his words, it is ,” he said. When it precedes the words, it is
He said, “ (Some writers use a colon here rather than a comma; some use neither.) Point 3): As a
general rule, put all other punctuation marks before you write the next speech mark: comma before
the closing speech mark in , ” he said; and comma before the opening speech mark in He said, “]
“Good morning,” he said.
Comment: No u.c. H after the comma.
“Oh, hello.”
Comment: This is a new speaker, so has a new
paragraph.
“Are you going to the party
tonight?” he asked. “I thought I
might, but it depends on how the
work’s going.”
Comment: An indent also shows a change of speaker.
“I think,” she answered, “that I will
stay in and wash my hair.”
Comment: She paused slightly in the middle of a single
sentence, so commas here, not a full stop.
“Oh. John rang. He said ‘Tell Sue
that the answer is
‘antidisestablishmentarianism’.”
Comment: New para = new speaker. We don’t need he
said. A speech inside a speech has the same rules - but
a different number of inverted commas. See below.
Even after a question mark, the ‘he’ has a l.c. letter.
He spoke two sentences. So use a full stop here.
Note on inverted commas (also called quotation marks and speech marks); do you use one or
two? The answer varies between different departments and publishers. Traditionally these were
always double in handwriting (I suspect to avoid mistakes with spots of ink). Nowadays the most
common rule in print is to use single inverted commas, but do as your department wants. In either
case, when you have speech inside speech (or a quotation inside a quotation), use the other. In fact,
you can, in theory, go on ‘toggling’ between single and double for ever – only it becomes confusing.
So don’t. Some writers use double for speech, and single to isolate individual words – as I have done
above with the jargon word ‘toggling’. Again, follow your department’s advice – and be consistent.
All web addresses in this leaflet were correct at the time of publication.
The information in this leaflet can be made available in an alternative
format on request. Telephone 01482 466199.
© 12/2007
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