Technical Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Appendix A

Punctuation Made Easy

Punctuation is one of the most significant tools you have to create documents that bear the mark of your own voice. When you speak aloud, you constantly punctuate sentences with your voice and body language. And when you write, you make a sound in the reader’s head. Your “writing voice” can be a dull, sleep-inducing mumble (like a tedious, unformatted document) or it can be a joyful sound, a shy whisper, a throb of passion. It all depends on the punctuation you use.

I present the punctuation marks in the order in which they’re most commonly used and confused.

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Here are a few general punctuation guidelines:

• Place commas and periods inside quotation marks.

  The engineer wanted to hear her supervisor say “yes.”

• Place semicolons and colons outside quotation marks.

  The design used is “Taguchi L16c”; it consists of 16 wafers.

• Place question marks and exclamation points inside the quotes only when they apply to the quoted material.

  “Did you read Sally’s findings?” Jim asked.

• Place question marks and exclamation points outside the quotes when they apply to the entire sentence.

  Did the supervisor say, “Set the pressure to 10 psi”?

You can also use punctuation to stress what you want your readers to see as important. For example, the following three sentences are worded identically. Yet the different marks of punctuation give each a ...