Punctuation in English Grammar

Punctuation is of particular importance in English since it acts as a way of giving definition to a sentence, ensuring that the words are given their correct meaning and actually provides the structure to the meaning of a sentence, so ignore it at your peril.

Punctuation marks are symbols, such as the comma, the apostrophe, the full stop, hyphen or quotation marks. Out of all of these the apostrophe is the one which can cause the most confusion. This is the symbol that denotes who owns something. So the phrase ‘The boy’s sweets’, means the sweets that belong to the boy. If however we say “The boys’ sweets”, then the meaning is completely changed. Just moving the apostrophe indicates to the reader that there is more than one boy. The apostrophe is also used to indicate that a letter or letters are missing from a word (contractions) such as in, can’t and don’t. Beware of the word its as this can stand alone without an apostrophe, or can have the apostrophe inserted as, it’s, meaning, ‘it is.’

Commas should be used to introduce a natural break in a sentence, but this is where it gets complicated. The use of the comma may be to define where independent clauses are joined together by a conjunction or it could separate items on a list, or it can separate independent and dependent clauses. A comma may also be used to introduce a concept of time and context.

So the use of the humble comma is not as straightforward as it may seem. For native English speakers the use of the comma is taught from an early age and many are unaware of the grammatical rules behind its use, they just know how to use it. In order to assess whether the comma is used effectively it is well worth using a grammar checker so that you can determine if all commas are in the correct location. After this you will start to get an awareness of where they should be placed. Remember however that some people regard the use of the comma as an unnecessary pause which interrupts the reading flow, believing it to be a punctuation mark that should only be used to avoid an ambiguity. In some modern writing the comma is used hardly at all. As a general rule do not overuse the comma.

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