Graham King - Collins Improve Your Punctuation

It’s an irony that although the wonderful communicating tool known as English is the second most widely used language in the world today, it is also probably the most abused and misused. During the last few decades millions of British schoolchildren were denied any formal instruction in important aspects of grammar and punctuation.

Now, as adults, many lack confidence when they come to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. Fortunately there are signs that near-illiteracy is no longer the fashion, and the urge to improve writing skills (judging from the sales of dictionaries and language books) is growing at a phenomenal rate.

This book is intended for all those people for whom punctuation is a plague of spots and dots and marks. The role of punctuation in writing good English is demonstrated step by logical, practical step. Hundreds of examples help explain in seconds what hours of former teaching – or the lack of it – never managed to impart.

And take heart! Somerset Maugham couldn’t handle commas. Jane Austen got her quotation marks in a twist. George Orwell feared semicolons so much he wrote a novel without any at all. The competition isn’t so awesome after all.

Collins Good Punctuation is an easy-going refresher course that banishes forever hassles with hyphens, catastrophes with apostrophes, confusion with commas. After an hour or two with this book the perils of punctuation should exist no more.

Punctuation for the Birds

The following passage employs all the punctuation marks used in writing English. They are, in order of appearance: capital letter, italic and bold emphasis, asterisk, semicolon, comma, parenthesis, colon, full stop, double quotation marks, contraction apostrophe, question mark, exclamation mark, underline, dash, hyphens, possessive apostrophe, square brackets, stroke, single quotation marks, and three-dot ellipsis.

The habits of the Rook*are very interesting and easily watched; hours can be wasted in early spring observing them as, cawing incessantly, they gather in their rookery to build or repair their large nests in the topmost branches, causing a rain of twigs and sticks to fall on the garden below (and not only on the garden: my brother was almost knocked out after being hit by a branch of Scots pine. “What’s that?” he cried out, obviously dazed. “A tree’s fallen on me!”) and which are never retrieved. Worse, of course, is to be struck by a dead rook – the weak and ne’er-do-wells are executed and expelled from their nests – and anyone blitzed by a half-kilo chunk of solid rook’s meat can say with some feeling [the editor concurs, having had just such an experience/calamity] that walking under a rookery is definitely ‘for the birds’ …

* And this is a footnote.

A Victorian Schoolmistress’s 10 Golden Rules of Punctuation

Sentences begin with a Capital letter,

So as to make your writing better.

Use a full stopto mark the end.

It closes every sentence penned.

The commais for short pauses and breaks,

And also for lists the writer makes.

Dashes– like these – are for thoughts by the way.

They give extra information (so do bracketswe may say).

These two dots are colons: they pause to compare.

They also do this: list, explain, and prepare.

The semicolonmakes a break; followed by a clause.

It does the job of words that link; it’s also a short pause.

An apostropheshows the owner of anyone’s things,

And it’s also useful for shortenings.

I’m so glad! He’s so mad! We’re having such a lark!

To show strong feelings use an exclamation mark!

A question markfollows What? When? Where? Why? and How?

Do you? Can I? Shall we? Give us your answer now!

“Quotation marks”enclose what is said,

Which is why they’re sometimes called “speech marks” instead.

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