‘Punctuation marks? Those pesky little squiggles that make writing so complicated?’ Well, if you aren’t in the habit of using them, this is probably how you’d feel about punctuation marks. Most people get away with using just 3 kinds: the period, the comma and the question mark. But if you’re serious about writing, knowing how to use more of these written symbols will help you get your message across much more clearly.

Punctuation marks are used to help you organize your thoughts, so that you can convey them in the way that you intend. Conversely, misuse — and especially abuse — of punctuation can result in misunderstanding, in your failure to communicate properly. Or worse: your inability to properly use colons, apostrophes, dashes, etc. could make you look, well, rather lacking in intellectual acuity.

I’ve seen quite a few punctuation errors in many blogs that I’ve come across. Even the proverbial “its” & “it’s” problem is still ubiquitous. After the first handful of sightings, I thought maybe those were just typos. But after seeing a bunch more, I got convinced that those people simply don’t know that there is a world of difference between the possessive form of the 3rd-person pronoun (inanimate), and the contraction of “it is”.

Another weakness is the semicolon. It’s hardly ever used in most blogs I’ve seen, and is used improperly in some cases. The basic idea behind this colon-and-comma hybrid is that, there is a strong relationship between the two parts of the sentence being separated by the semicolon, so much so that using a period might cancel such relationship. A good example would be a sentence containing statements of cause and effect.

Another use of the semicolon is as a list delimiter. In this case, the list items contain internal punctuation, so that using a comma to separate the items might cause confusion.

I’d also like to say something about the use of the ellipsis (…). Originally, it was meant to be used in place of words that have been intentionally omitted in a quote. In fact, the term “ellipsis” comes from the Greek word that means ‘omission’. In more literary uses, it conveys silence, or the idea of your refusal to say anything more regarding the topic at hand. Don’t overdo it, though. The impression I get when I see too many ellipses in a piece of writing is, the author’s trying to be coy by withholding information… or he’s probably dumb.

Now, there are just too many punctuation marks for me to be able to cover here. So, I’ll just try to answer any question you might have about this topic. Let’s continue this in the comments area below, shall we?

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