Punctuation: The Secret Ingredient

Ever found yourself using a whole bunch of commas in a lone sentence?

Stayed up late at night wondering if you might have used an exclamation point too many?

Wished you had more than an insipid comma in your artillery when faced with an intricate thought just begging to be penned down?

Or even simply wanted to confirm precisely which punctuation mark would convey your thought with most effect?

Incorrect punctuation is a pestilence infecting even the best amongst us. Treat this guide like you would a vaccine.

At first glance, grammar might seem inconsequential when you're in the midst of telling a really good story; yet eyes tend to glaze over the rest of the story when the fifth mistake in a single sentence snags the reader's attention.
Put simply, a horror story in a single sentence: the reader read through the story but remembers only the grammatical errors.
I think my heart just skipped a beat in pure fear.

I'm not a grammar whiz but I'll try to help you out anyway. It might be selfish in it's selflessness, this decision of mine to help people like me out with the usual suspects. If this were Scooby-Doo, the following is a list of the troublemakers that tend to trip up innocent writers like you and I.

Let's begin with the basics: punctuation.

There's a lot many ways to punctuate a sentence, yet the general trend seems to favour commas. The saddest bit is reading a good story except the sentences are too long and too devoid of efficient punctuation to be effective.
Long story short, it rambles and thus, bores. (see what I did there? "Long story short" huh? Huh?)

We're only gonna be discussing the most essential punctuation marks, and as efficiently as possible. Buckle in.

1) Ellipses (. . .)
- Three periods, no more no less, to indicate trailing off either mid-sentence or mid-thought.
- Has spaces in between (yes, I googled to fact check) UNLESS next to a quotation (") mark. Something like this: "...see no spaces...".

2) Em dash (—)
- It's the long dash. As in, longer than this one (-), the hyphen. They have different uses. Oh what a beautiful life.
- Can substitute commas, parentheses or colons (comma-philes take note).
- A maximum of two appearances per sentence — unless you want the reader to stop reading out of sheer bewilderment — as demonstrated. Yup, that's how you use the em dash in place of commas or parentheses.
- Use em dash in place of a colon when you wish to emphasize the end of your sentence — like this.

3) Hyphen (-)
- It's name is about seven times it's length (I measured). Thus, it's the short dash.
- It's perhaps the easiest punctuation to use. Want to hook one word to another to form a compound term? The hyphen is your guy. Un-fricking-believable, isn't it?
- The most grief is caused due to confusion between the distinct roles of the hyphen and the em dash (see above). Google, copy, paste if your keyboard doesn't have the em dash (mine doesn't). Put in the effort, your story needs you to. #STOPhyphenMISUSE

4) Semicolon (;)
- It's like milky coffee; stronger than tea but weaker than an espresso. Trumps a comma but yields to a period.
- Use it when you feel the need to eliminate a coordinating conjunction between two independent clauses; complete separation of the two clauses isn't your objective.
- The preceding sentence uses a semicolon between two independent clauses. The coordinating conjunction eliminated to make space for the semicolon is "but". Replace the semicolon with "but" and the sentence will still make complete sense; might be a tad too long though.
- The above is the easiest and most useful function of the semicolon, especially for our writing purposes. We'll save the minute details for a rainy day.

5) Quotation marks (")
- Largely used to indicate material that is being produced verbatim.
- Not to be confused or used interchangeably with the apostrophe ('). They aren't brothers; they aren't even distant cousins. Both cover a host of uses which have zero overlap. None.
- Let's not forget that if the punctuation mark at the end of your sentence is within the quotation marks, IT IS included in the material being quoted.
- For example: He said, "Get me an ice-cream?" is an entirely different sentence from
He said "Get me an ice-cream"?.
One is a statement while the other is interrogative in nature.

6) Exclamation point (!)
- Newsflash children: exclamation points are most effective when used in moderation. shocker, isn't it.
- Google says that an abundance of exclamation points "...flagrantly demonstrates a writer's contempt for his reader.". Pretty savage, but very efficiently summarized. Intense emotions DO NOT need a host of exclamation points to get said emotion across to the reader.
- I don't really have a third point. Feel free to read the first two again.

7) Colon (:)
- Used between independent clauses when the second clause explains the first: precisely in the manner as demonstrated.
- DO NOT capitalize the word after the colon unless it is a word normally capitalized, like a proper noun etc.
- There is NO space between the last word of the first clause and the colon. However there IS a space between the colon and the first word of the second clause. Details make a world of difference, believe me.
- Here's a tricky one; if two or more SENTENCES follow a colon, capitalize the first word immediately after the colon.
- To add emphasis to the end of a sentence, similar to the em dash: confusing.
- When listing items, ONLY if the list IS NOT incorporated into the sentence. To illustrate with an example:
> The school teaches many subjects including art, psychology and economics.
AS OPPOSED TO
> The school teaches many subjects: art, psychology, economics etc.
HENCEFORTH, the list is incorporated in the first sentence but isn't in the second sentence.

That's all folks!
Well, not really but those are the seven most commonly used punctuation marks excluding the comma. The comma is a fearsome beast, deserving of another guide all to itself. In the meantime, use these as a stopgap.
The better you are at punctuating, the more effective your sentences and thus, your writing as a whole.

Oh and to ease a fellow warrior's way, any and all uses mentioned (of the above punctuation marks) have been promptly demonstrated, often in the sentence itself. Convenient, isn't it?

Now that all your fears and worries and insecurities about how to choose or use the right punctuation are gone forever – what’s stopping you from trying it out? Tap the button below to start writing now!