ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the main punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation mark, full stop, hyphen, question mark, quotation marks, semicolon, and slash. It also deals with other mechanical conventions such as abbreviations, bullets, capital letters, contractions, italics, and numbers. Punctuation is an essential ingredient in written communication because it clarifies relationships between words and groups of words by revealing the structure of sentences. This, in tum, increases the reader's understanding. Punctuation also controls the pace and rhythm of sentences. Punctuation marks in writing can indicate where a speaker would pause, but they do not necessarily or always coincide with the pauses that a speaker would make. The most important principle to keep in mind when the readers are writing/editing any document is consistency, and the placing of their punctuation marks is no exception.
