The question mark is another one-job punctuation mark. Exclamation points can be fun in casual messages and show the passion in a character’s voice when you’re writing fiction, but they’re usually not a good choice in any kind of formal, academic, or business writing. Just be careful not to overuse them-and in some kinds of writing, it’s best to leave them out entirely.
Much like the period, the exclamation point has one job: to make sentences exciting! You read that sentence in an eager, high-energy voice because it ended with an exclamation point : ! However, the only time an apostrophe is used to pluralize a noun is when the noun being pluralized is a lowercase letter. For example:ĭon’t use them when you’re referring to a decade numerically (correct: the 1990s, incorrect: the 1990’s)ĭon’t use them when the last letter follows an apostrophe (correct: don’ts, incorrect: don’t’s)ĭon’t use them when describing a group of people (correct: the Chens are coming to dinner, incorrect: the Chen’s are coming to dinner) One last note on apostrophes: Most of the time, they are not used to pluralize nouns. Combining words into contractions (don’t, she’ll, weren’t)Īnd more casually, apostrophes are used to shorten words (government becomes gov’t and the 1970s becomes the ’70s) and in quotes to show the speaker has shortened a word, for example: We looked and found nothin’.Creating possessive nouns (Jim’s house, the Kelleys’ car).The apostrophe is a busy little punctuation mark. This is what can make them tricky-the points where you’d pause in a spoken sentence aren’t always where you’d use a comma in a written sentence. A comma indicates a pause in a sentence, either between phrases, clauses, or items in a list. They’re also among the most commonly misused punctuation marks. CommasĬommas are one of the most common punctuation marks. This evolved into ellipses’ use in casual conversation, like text messages and social media posts, where they’re frequently used to indicate pauses.
In fiction and poetry, they’re also used to build suspense, show a speaker’s voice is trailing off or faltering, or represent incomplete thoughts. They’re used to show that information has been omitted from a quote, usually to shorten it. EllipsesĮllipses look like a set of three periods together. It has one job: to end a declarative sentence. The period, also known as the full stop, looks like this. When it comes to punctuation marks, you don’t get any more basic than periods.
Basic and common punctuation marks Periods
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