Punctuation

Punctuation is a system of symbols (symbols) that are used to separate written sentences and parts of sentences, and to make their meaning clear. Each symbol is called a "punctuation mark".

Punctuation marks are tools used in writing to separate sentences and their elements, and to clarify meaning. Punctuation comes from the Latin word punctum, meaning point. Depending on their context and placement in a sentence, punctuation marks can alter the meaning of a sentence. For example, "woman, without her man, is nothing" and "woman: without her, man is nothing" have greatly different meanings.

History

The first writing systems were either logographic or syllabic—for example, Chinese and Maya script—which do not require punctuation, especially spacing. This is because the entire morpheme or word is typically clustered within a single glyph, so spacing does not help as much to distinguish where one word ends and the other starts. The earliest alphabetic writing had no capitalization, no spaces, no vowels and few punctuation marks. This worked as long as the subject matter was restricted to a limited range of topics (e.g., writing used for recording business transactions).

Types of Punctuation Marks

There are several types of punctuation marks, including:

• Period (.)
• Comma (,)
• Exclamation mark (!)
• Question mark (?)
• Colon (:)
• Semicolon (;)
• Quotation mark (" ")
• Apostrophe (')
• Hyphen (-)
• Dash (—)
• Bracket ([ ])
• Parentheses (( ))
• Ellipsis (...)

Each of these punctuation marks has specific uses and rules for when they should be used.

Usage

The usage of punctuation marks varies greatly in different languages. In fact, some languages use certain punctuation marks very rarely or not at all. For example, the exclamation mark is rarely used in formal or academic writing in English, but is commonly used in Spanish.

See Also

• List of punctuation marks
• Sentence (linguistics)
• Grammar
• Writing system

References

Punctuation Resources
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