Lots of handbooks explain how punctuation works, but who wants to read pages of information in a grammar textbook? Today’s #InfographicInspiration won’t eliminate the need to look up how certain rules work; however, it does provide a nice overview of the primary ways that most punctuation marks are used.
I suspect that you will be familiar with a lot of the rules, especially for marks like periods, commas, and exclamation points. Other punctuation marks may be new to you, such as en dashes and em dashes.
If you find anything new to you or need more information on an exclamation, try searching for details on the information on Punctuation on the Purdue OWL site.
10 Comments
I learned a couple of things from this infographic that will help me more efficiently use punctuation. First off I never knew that “—” this was known as an em dash. Another name for a punctuation that I did not know was an en dash which is “-“. I also didn’t know that a comma is used after abbreviations such as i.e. and e.g. All and all I found this guide very helpful. It did have some information that I already previously knew, but it also had some new information that I learned about punctuation.
As a bit of a language nerd (NLP to be more specific), I was glad to see that I don’t usually offend any of these listed rules on syntax. However, it does peeve me how different software and word processors treat/handle dashes. It’s something I’m aware of, but not caring enough to fix most of the time. In ASCII, it’s common to treat hyphens as a single “-“, en dashes as a double “–” and em dashes as a triple “—” (especially in LaTeX source). Word processors though will try to correct, and sometimes even over-correct, dashes to what it thinks looks right. The processor has its own idea about proper dash length (along with font considerations), so even using the correct dash, it might not appear as the expected length. My approach is to attempt to use my intended dash, correct if need be, but mostly hope for the best.
It’s also interesting to see how punctuation is used in other languages. Studying Asian languages, it’s one thing to have grammatical clauses and another to have separating punctuation. Japanese, not even having spaces between “words,” will sometimes place a comma between the topic and predicate of a sentence. I could go on, but I’d rather not offer analysis where I’m not knowledgeable. It’s a long-standing hobby more than a specialization.
That’s another good example of how word processors can steer you wrong when you rely on their autocorrect functions. When I’m working with ascii, I’m always peeved by the assumption that I want smart quotations.
Quotes in LaTeX are a bad habit that’s so easy to mess up on. I often forget I need to begin with two backticks to start an open quote and a quotation mark to end it. I’ll print out my paper, and then I’ll catch that I have two backwards facing quotes in my document and nearly flip a table over it.
Having not been in an English class since my senior year of high school, I often find myself unsure of what types of punctuation to use and when to use them. This infographic has proven to be a helpful, quick resource for future assignments and writing in general. Of course, there were definitely rules on here that I can easily recall, but it was also educational. For example, I was unaware that “[ ]” were used to emphasize when italics were used in a quote. I was also unaware that the different types of dashes had specific names.
I have always struggled with citing different types of books/short article/journals, etc. so I like how this guide specific which punctuation is used for which. I actually save this photo on my desktop so I can easily access it when writing it the future – its definitely a great tool to have on hand! N0t only did I learn how to properly employ punctuation I usually use, I also learned how to use punctuation in new ways that will add variety to my sentence structure. I think using [] and — will make my writing seem more mature. I typically dont quote people in my writing but I would be interested in scribing before medical school so I think “—” is a good tool to master. I really liked the use of “-” to end a fragment. I usually avoid fragments at all cost but It is interesting that this punctuation can be used to incorporate well placed fragments into my writing.
This infographic is the one I will save it and refer to later when I have to use them. I often offend those rules listed in the infographic without knowing I’m offending it. The one thing I never used in any of my documents is ‘…’ because I never knew the use of it and it is not needed when it comes to the report I think. It was very educational infographic for me.
The very first thing that strikes me about this infographic is how many different things a coma is used for. I’ve never really thought about its prevalence in writing, but it’s a very valuable tool that can add a whole new element to writing structurally, organizationally, and in terms of flow. Also, one thing I learned from the infographic is that a question mark can be used to as a question mid sentence. I’m not really sure if I’ve ever seen this before and I’m a little curious about what it would look like and how it would work; I’ve only ever seen a question mark at the end of a sentence.
Well, punctuation has always been a problem for me when I’m writing the paper but just like it says that I never have the patient to read through a long reading to fix these kind of things. The is article is very useful and make so make thing clearer for me. Some of the old long readings that I’ve read are just hard to remember and just can’t get them in use. In this article I learned something new which is the en dash. This is really helpful because sometimes when I’m writing and when I think some words might be right and it seems right but there are red underlines marks as wrong words. And I just checked by using my words editor and some of them could be fixed by adding an en dash. Very helpful writing and could be remember easily.
I learned a couple things from this infographic. I didn’t know brackets were used for inside quotations to show non-quoted information and I also didn’t realize that there are multiple ways to use commas and colons. I think it’s easy not to write the punctuation in the correct form because, unless someone has been taught very well in middle/high school about the situations to use punctuation, it’s one of the most common mistakes. I know when there is a lost of items people forget to add the last comma at the end of the list and I researched more into it and learned it’s called the Oxford comma.