Start here to learn about punctuation.

Hello and welcome to this section on punctuation.

A good question would be, well what is punctuation?

So let’s look to Wikipedia for a good definition.

Wikipedia tells us it is the practice action or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts in order to aid interpretation, division of text into sentences, clauses etc.

by means of such marks.

Well,

Okay that’s great as a description but in practice it really means helping us to interpret text properly by telling us which parts belong together, when parts and the new parts begin and so on.

And this section is structured in the following way.

So the first few lessons are on things that come at the end of a sentence.

So they will be full stops, exclamation marks and question marks.

And then we have a lesson on quotation marks and following that we have punctuation marks that are used for pauses and breaks and that is then commas, semicolons and colons.

And in this block we also take a look at the Oxford comma, or the so-called Oxford comma, and the next group we have are things like connectors and dividers.

So they would include hyphens, dashes, slashes and apostrophes.

And the last sort of serious lesson is on brackets and all the different types of brackets we have and how we use those.

As a reward for getting through all that punctuation, the very last lesson is a fun lesson and it can show you sort of what happens if you get the punctuation wrong.

So we’ll take several sentences and punctuate them differently and show you how they can have wildly different meanings in the same sequence of words.

All we’ve changed is maybe a the placement of a comma and that’s your reward as a fun lesson at the end of this section.

I hope you enjoy it.