Punctuation

We may have time for a quiz on this before exams, but it will certainly be part of the exam.  I won't expect you to make no mistakes, but I do expect you to be good with the basics at grade seven!

In order of most to less important, it is essential to use these punctuation marks well:
- periods
- commas
- question marks
- apostrophes
- quotation marks
- colons
- hyphens

You can get by without these, and people use them too often and poorly besides:
- ellipses
- exclamation marks
- semicolons
- dashes
- parentheses

If you use the last five often, it more often means: your writing is poorly organized, so you've resorted to dashes and parentheses to make some sense out of it; your writing relies on exclamation marks instead of more exciting vocabulary; and you've used semicolons or ellipses to appear clever but it has failed.  When you are unsure how to use the last five, better to avoid using them at all; you cannot avoid using the first seven, so best to learn to use them well.

The links above are brief explanations which will keep you on track almost all of the time.  So will these quizzes help.  I still learn new punctuation rules at my age, but because I am (at least) as knowledgeable as the links nobody has found an error of mine in decades. Accurate punctuation, like good grammar and correct spelling, makes you look as intelligent as you truly are: anything else makes you appear less...

If you can find a free or cheap app to help you, so much the better.

If you are as odd as your teacher, you will enjoy this humorous book about punctuation, and how using it poorly makes you look a fool even if you are not: 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves'.  It is not required reading for our class, but at a few hundred yen in e-book quite good value.  Her rules are quite British, but often universal.  (On grammar and style, 'The Elements of Style' is a classic, invaluable, and also short.  His rules are quite American, but often universal.)

Here is a bit of a sample, but without the humour: 'An Educational Companion to EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES'.

Two of the better quotations from here:

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying "Giant Kid's Playground", and then wonder why everyone says away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)