Punctuation

You may have noticed that punctuation already came up quite a bit during Lesson 2. That's because punctuation is a necessary part of sentences.

Punctuation marks are like traffic signals. They control the flow of meaning on the page, telling the reader when to pause, when to stop, and when there's a turn ahead. Just as there are laws that govern the use of traffic signals, there are rules about where punctuation marks should go.

There are some situations where the decision of whether or not to use a punctuation mark is left up to the writer. You don't need to worry about these situations too much: you just need to know the hard and fast rules of punctuation presented in this lesson.

You have already learned some of these rules. In Lesson 2, for instance, you were reminded that sentences are separated by a period (also known as a "full stop"). We also learned a bit about the use of colons and semi-colons. In this module, we are going to take our knowledge of punctuation a step further and examine some of the trickier punctuation marks, such as apostrophes, commas, and dashes. We will also look at how punctuation is used with quotations.