Punctuation Guide: 60 Minutes to Better Writing

Summary

What you need to know about punctuation as taught widely in high school and grade schools. As the author says, "It is far easier to improve your writing by using proper punctuation than by studying grammar, a far more complex subject."

The author scopes out the project to assure the listener that this is not as challenging as they may fear. He says there are only thirteen punctuation marks in English, and only three are truly troublesome: the sentence bridges which include the comma, colon, and semi-colon. As the author suggests, you should focus on the tracks that really matter, the sentence bridges, and give less attention to the other ten. What is so helpful to the listener is the clear differentiation between the important punctuation marks, how to work effectively with them, and how to avoid issues with your meaning.

The introduction is especially helpful, "Fix your writing through better punctuation." Following that, the author covers the three sentence endings: the period, question mark, and exclamation point; the three sentence bridges: the comma, colon, and semi-colon; and the others: the apostrophe, bracket, dash, ellipsis, hyphen, parentheses, and quotation marks. In just sixty minutes your writing will be more crisp and effective—no small thing!