Punctuation

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters, including punctuation marks (listed at right), inter-word spaces, capitalization, and indentation.

Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither phonemes (sounds) of a language nor to lexemes (words and phrases), but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud.

In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, "Woman, without her man, is nothing." and "Woman: without her, man is nothing." have greatly different meanings, as do "Eats shoots and leaves" and "Eats, shoots and leaves".

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic, and thus the author's (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

We hope that these pages on punctuation will be useful to you. Please use the menu on the left or the links below.

• Apostrophes
• Brackets
• Colons
• Semi-Colons
• Commas
• Hyphens and Dashes
• Terminating Marks
• Question Marks
• Quotation Marks

For further help, see this guide to punctuation by Larry Trask (1997).