Today’s discussion is on the use of Punctuation. In other words, how to make the sentence sound coherent by using different items such as a semicolon, comma, hyphen, colon, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, ellipsis, quotation marks, dash, and the all-important period.

We will not go thru the list of punctuations above because that is what our text book is for, but I will go thru a few which I have found to be, for me as unusual, different. The two that I will discuss in this paper is the semicolon and ellipsis.

This semicolon is used to slow down the reading of the sentence by the reader, but does not allow the sentence to come to a complete stop. A semicolon can be used between two different clauses when a conjunction is not available and most journalists try very hard to avoid the use of the semicolon. The sentence below is a good example of how a semicolon could be  used.

The POW/MIA flag is black with white lettering; the American flag

 is red, white, and blue.

            The second punctuation is the proper use of parentheses. Parentheses are normally used to set aside information that would be nonessential or to clarify a quotation. If the information to be set aside contains at least one sentence, then put a period at the end of the sentence inside the parentheses and if the information is not very long, then place the period on the outside of the parentheses. For me, I mostly use parentheses for math. The sentence below is a good example of how parentheses are used.

Is lane splitting (sharing) for motorcyclists safe? (See last page for one individual’s opinion.)

            For my example of an editing mistake that I encountered during the week is from one of my math

books. The mistake (picture at right) is at the beginning of the fourth paragraph and the fix for this is simply placing a comma after the word century.