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Eg: The old man said the boy was a thief.

The old man, said the boy, was a thief.

The old man is speaking in the first sentence. The boy is speaking in the second.

Apostrophe: Possession and contractions are indicated using apostrophes. Moreover, they
are employed to indicate a quotation mark in text that has already been quoted.

Eg: It was Mary’s pen that the boy wrote with.
“Tom said, ‘If you come here, it would be better.’”

Quotation: When anything is directly copied from another work or was uttered, quotation
marks are used to let the reader know. If a word that is employed in a particular context or oth-
erwise deserves special attention, it should also have quotation marks around it. In colloquial
contexts, quotations can also be employed to indicate irony.

Eg: Leela said, “Is this my new car?”

The doctor claims, “The use of tobacco will lead to cancer.”

Question and Exclamation: To denote interrogative and exclamatory statements, use ques-
tion and exclamation signs. These two punctuation marks aren’t typically employed in academic
writing. Every question becomes rhetorical in the absence of discourse, thus it would be pref-
erable to reword it as a statement.

Hyphen: The most frequent usage of hyphens is to join two compound terms.

Eg: mother-in-law, long-term, sun-dried

Dash: Dashes are generally not used, however they signify a divergent thinking within a
thought. The “en” dash and the “em” dash are the two different types of dashes. En dashes have
a similar appearance to hyphens but serve a different function. An easy way to remember that
en dashes are shorter and em dashes are longer is to think of them as being the length of a n
and m, respectively.

Eg: I think that the boy is a fool— but doesn’t everybody think that boy is?

When necessary, dashes can take the place of commas and semicolons. They can take the
place of commas to indicate unnecessary details and semicolons to indicate examples. Dashes
should not be used frequently in your writing despite their versatility. Dashes are versatile and
simple to overuse, which reduces rather than improves the clarity of your text.

Parenthesis (), Brackets [], Braces {}

Non-essential details that can be omitted from sentences without changing their meaning are
noted in parenthesis. When a writer is omitting or elaborating within a quotation in academic
writing, brackets are most frequently used. Anytime an ellipsis or explanation is used, the writer
inserts a bracket within the quote and then closes the bracket to continue the sentence.

122 SGOU - FYUGP - SLM - English for Communication