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.
Like David, I use quite a range but I love a semi-colon! I find them quite helpful when I am writing as I can extend ideas and sentences. However I steer clear from brackets, dashes, colons and ellipsis I think it looks a bit unprofessional. I was always taught at school that you should never include those in a piece as it made it look messy!
I find question marks are helpful if you are explaining thoughts and feelings of the characters in certain situations e.g 'She didn't know what to do. Had she done the right thing? Would she ever regret it?' but I try and avoid using them if possible. Same with exclamation marks, I find that they are often overused so I tend to avoid using them.
Interesting topic :)
And one should always spell and grammar check!
:-(
I use the whole range. For the most part I try to use them strictly accurately. I don't think that there are always enough variations to convey every subtlety of meaning though so sometimes I get inventive.
Some people loath this. They don't even like multiple !!! or !? but I think that that is there loss - or lack of imagination.
I have tried spacing down a line or two before a next action or event to indicate elapsed time but that doesn't look right. It just gives an impression of bad editing or typesetting.
I have recently been experimenting with using reduced font sizes to indicate speech in whispers as well. I don't yet know how well this will work. We use the reverse to indicate shouting so - provided peoples' eyes can still see the words - it might work.
And dashes are something else people say shouldn't be used...
Or...
:-)