Renowned American essayist Russell Baker once wrote that punctuation is to writing as intonation is to speaking. This advice means that if you read your sentences aloud, you will usually hear where the periods, question marks, commas, and hyphens go.
This point was well illustrated in one of my seminars by Magda Hanna, a customer service representative at the Provident Bank. After she correctly punctuated a sentence with multiple commas, I asked Ms. Hanna how she knew the answer.
“I went by how it feels,” she said.
We had not yet discussed the punctuation rules applying to that sentence, yet she had the answer. The idea makes sense, provided you know the general uses of each punctuation mark. Read the sentences aloud, and you’ll probably punctuate just fine.
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A participant in one of my workshops, D. Hom, asked a question about hyphenating expressions such as “end of year.” Determining what to h...
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READER QUESTION Which of the following sentences is correct? The contract was signed by Lee, Sam, and me . The contract was ... -
It's a good thing that the hyphen is not a frequently used punctuation mark because most people don't know how to use it. The hyp...