Guide to Punctuation

Larry Trask
University of Sussex

• Introduction
• Why Learn to Punctuate?
• The Full Stop, the Question Mark and the Exclamation Mark
  • The Full Stop
  • The Question Mark
  • The Exclamation Mark
  • A Final Point
  • Fragments
• The Comma
  • The Listing Comma
  • The Joining Comma
  • The Gapping Comma
  • Bracketing Commas
  • Summary of Commas
• The Colon and the Semicolon
  • The Colon
  • The Semicolon
  • The Colon and the Semicolon Compared
• The Apostrophe
  • Contractions
  • Unusual plurals
  • Possessives
• The Hyphen and the Dash
  • The Hyphen
  • The Dash
• Capital Letters and Abbreviations
  • Capital Letters
  • Abbreviations
• Quotations
  • Quotation Marks and Direct Quotations
  • Scare Quotes
  • Quotation Marks in Titles
  • Talking About Words
• Miscellaneous
  • Italics
  • Boldface
  • Small Capitals
  • Parentheses
  • Square Brackets
  • The Ellipsis
  • The Slash
  • Numerals, Fractions and Dates
  • Diacritics
  • The Other Marks on Your Keyboard
  • Priority Among Punctuation Marks
• Punctuating Essays and Letters
  • Titles and Section Headings
  • Footnotes
  • References to Published Work
  • Bibliography
  • Paragraphing
  • Punctuating Letters
• Bibliography