Punctuation
1. Punctuation marks
The table below shows the names of the most important punctuation marks.
| Symbol | name |
| ‘ | apostrophe |
| * | asterix |
| @ | at |
| () | brackets / parentheses |
| : | colon |
| , | comma |
| – | dash |
| … | ellipsis |
| ! | exclamation mark |
| . | full stop/period |
| – | hyphen |
| ? | question mark |
| ; | semi-colon |
| [ ] | square brackets |
| / & | stroke / slash & backslash |
| “” | double quotation mark / speech mark / |
| ‘…’ | quotation marks / inverted commas |
| _ | underline / underscore |
1. Capital letters
We use capital letters at the beginning of the following words:
| Word types | Examples |
| Names of days and month | Monday, Tuesday, January, February |
| Names of holidays | Christmas, Easter, Labour Day |
| Names and surnames of people | John Smith, Joe Blogs |
| Names of institutions, places, stars, planets, newspapers | Europe, The Thames, Sirius, Mars, The New York Times |
| Titles of people | Mr, Miss, Dr, Professor Black, Admiral Webb |
| Nouns and adjectives referring to countries and nationalities | Britain, British, Germany, German, Spain, Spanish |
| The first word and other important words of book and movie titles | Star Wars, Captain America, Gulliver’s Travels, The Catcher in the Rye |
1. Hyphen
Here is a summary that tells you when to use the various punctuation marks.
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Hyphen (-) | To create compound words | Off-limits, bottle opener, topsy-turvy, nice-looking |
| With some prefixes | Post-war, ex-wife, self-centered, co-worker | |
| With numbers from 21 to 99 and fractions | Twenty-eight, thirty-two, two-fifth |
1. Full stop
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Full stop (.) | To show the end of the sentence | Cats like milk. |
| After people’s initials and titles | F. J. Kennedy, Dr. P. Black,
Mr. Smith |
|
| In some abbreviations |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Question mark (?) | At the end of questions | |
| Exclamation mark (!) | At the end of a command or exclamation | |
| Comma (,) | After ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in answers | No, I’ve never met her.
Yes, I know it. |
| After greetings | Hi, how are you?
Dear Sir, Yours sincerely, |
|
| Between words in a list (except when we use ‘and’ or ‘or’) | He likes cars, books, bikes and trains. | |
| In addresses | 34 Main Road, Harrogate, North Yorkshire | |
| In dates | 18th May, 2016 | |
| In numbers after the thousands | 5,349 / 123,569 / 45,864 | |
| After subordinate clauses | If you finish your dinner, you can go out to play. | |
| Before question tags | You like him, don’t you? | |
| In relative clauses??? | Mr. Smith, who was born in 1902, worked in the coal mines of England. | |
| Before and after adverbs | I’d, however, like to live abroad.
Actually, he was promoted. |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Apostrophe (‘) | In contractions | It’s (it is), they’re (they are), I’d (I had / I would), can’t (can not), isn’t, aren’t, wouldn’t, etc |
| With irregular plurals | Do’s and don’t’s, three M.P.’s | |
| In the possessive | Jack’s book, Elena’s frog |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Quotation marks (‘..’) | When we quote other people’s words | |
| To emphasize words | ||
| Sometimes around titles of books, movies, etc. |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Colon (:) | Before explanations | |
| Before quotations | ||
| Semi-colon (;) | Between grammatically separate sentences |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Dash (–) | In informal writing to extend the sentence with an extra thought | I’d love to see all the capital cities – Paris, London, Berlin, all of them. |
| Instead of a colon, or brackets |
| Punctuation Mark | Usage | Example |
| Ellipses (…) | To indicate omission or hesitation in speech | |
| Square brackets [] | To explain words in a sentence | |
| To indicate when a text is changed slightly |
Ready to test your knowledge?
Put the grammar rules above into practice with the challenge below.
