Grammar Essentials For Dummies

Chapter 7

Polishing Your Punctuation

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting a handle on apostrophes and quotation marks

Using commas and dashes appropriately

Knowing when to hyphenate

Bringing colons into your repertoire

If you like rules, this chapter is for you. Whether they’re logical or not, you have to follow the punctuation rules I spell out here when you’re writing in formal English. Please don’t try to memorize them all at once; I don’t want to be responsible for the cerebral damage that could result. Instead, use this chapter as a reference when you just can’t recall where to put a question mark in a sentence with a quotation or whether a hyphen is necessary in a compound word.

Note: If you’re looking for the lowdown on using periods and semicolons, I cover those punctuation marks in Chapter 4, where I talk about constructing sentences.

More Rules Than the IRS: Using Apostrophes

For some reason, even educated people throw apostrophes where they don’t belong and leave them out where they’re needed. But from now on, you can rise above their ranks. That’s because in this section, I explain ...