I mainly use: commas, fullstops and apostrophes.
I use question marks, ellipsis, colons and hyphens sparingly.
I rarely use, semi-colons, dashes, brackets/parentheses, obliques or exclamation marks.
I mainly use: commas, fullstops and apostrophes.
I use question marks, ellipsis, colons and hyphens sparingly.
I rarely use, semi-colons, dashes, brackets/parentheses, obliques or exclamation marks.
Laura, the general rule is ditch anything you learned at school. You were taught to strip out punctuation because they assumed you'd be writing business letters; but large texts are brought to life by a reasonable smattering of the right punctuation. You don't have to suddenly litter your work where ever a gap appears and I'd be the first to tell anyone to keep their commas under control, but take some time to review some of the marks you use the least and question whether the rhythm could be improved by their occasional inclusion.
As a side note, I also love the interrobang (‽) for when you want somebody to exclaim a question. I find it looks neater than ?! or !?. It never really caught on though. You can find it in the Symbols list within MS Word and assign it to a keystroke if you like it. I'm not sure what my future agents will make of it, although I hopefully will find that out very soon.
More information can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
I completely agree with Kathleen (no ! mark)
Has anyone else noticed that the punctuation is always perfect until the moment that the pages start to come out of the printer?
David.