English punctuation-Cedar Herald Index

Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. In popular discussion of language, incorrect punctuation is often seen as an indication of lack of education and of a decline of standards.

Variants

British and American styles

The two broad styles of punctuation in English are often called British (typically used in the UK, Ireland, and most of the Commonwealth of Nations) and American (also common in Canada and places with a strong American influence on local English, as in the Philippines). These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks with adjacent punctuation, and the use or omission of the full point (period) with contraction abbreviations.

English punctuation

Open and closed punctuation

The terms open and closed punctuation have been applied to minimizing versus comprehensively including punctuation, respectively, aside from any dialectal trends. Closed punctuation is used in scholarly, literary, general business, and "everyday" writing. Open style dominates in text messaging and other short-form online communication, where more formal or "closed" punctuation can be misinterpreted as aloofness or even hostility.

English punctuation

Open punctuation

Open punctuation eliminates the need for a period at the end of a stand-alone statement, in an abbreviation or acronym (including personal initials and post-nominal letters, and time-of-day abbreviations), as well as in components of postal addresses. This style also eschews optional commas in sentences, including the serial comma. Open punctuation also frequently drops apostrophes.

English punctuation

Open punctuation is used primarily in certain forms of business writing, such as letterhead and envelope addressing, some business letters, and résumés and their cover letters.

Closed punctuation

In contrast, closed punctuation uses commas and periods in a strict manner.

Closed style is common in presentations, especially in bulleted and numbered lists. It is also frequently used in advertising, marketing materials, news headlines, and signage.

Usage of different punctuation marks or symbols

Frequency

One analysis found the average frequencies for English punctuation marks, based on 723,000 words of assorted texts, to be as follows (as of 2013, but with some text corpora dating to 1998 and 1987):

Apostrophe

The apostrophe , , sometimes called inverted comma in British English, is used to mark possession, as in "John's book", and to mark letters omitted in contractions, such as you're for you are.

Brackets

Brackets , are used for parenthesis, explanation or comment: such as "John Smith (the elder, not his son)..."

Colon

The colon is used to start an enumeration, as in Her apartment needed a few things: a toaster, a new lamp, and a nice rug. It is used between two clauses when the second clause otherwise clarifies the first, as in I can barely keep my eyes open: I hardly got a wink of sleep.

Comma

The comma ( , ) is used to disambiguate the meaning of sentences, by providing boundaries between clauses and phrases. For example, "Man, without his cell phone, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of cell phone) and "Man: without, his cell phone is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men) have greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" (to mean "consumes plant growths") and "eats, shoots and leaves" (to mean "eats firstly, fires a weapon secondly, and leaves the scene thirdly").

The comma is also used to group digits in numerals and dates: "2,000" and "January 7, 1985". In many other languages, the comma is used as the decimal separator.

Dash and hyphen

The dash and hyphen or hyphen-minus is used: as a line continuation when a word is broken across two lines; to apply a prefix to a word for which there is no canonical compound word; as a replacement for a comma, when the subsequent clause significantly shifts the primary focus of the preceding text.