Think of a long day without any break, mere thinking of it feels so tiring, now think of a story without break, no sense right? The break that we’ll discuss is nothing but punctuations.
History of Punctuation: When They got Their Place.
Historians believe punctuations are what, invented to read any text aloud. Punctuations are a basic yet profound concept of writing which is taken too lightly.
To understand the importance of something, It’s very important to unearth the time when it just came into being for instance back then in 1879 when light bulbs were invented, were taken too seriously but today it’s just something we go across everyday unnoticed.
Similarly punctuations grew around 5th century BCE. , they grew to serve Greece playwright as to such when an actor should take a pause using certain symbols then in 3rd century c.AD. , punctuation was formally coined by Aristophanes of Byzantium.
Importance and Proper Way of Using Punctuation
Punctuations are an important part of writing be it in any language, apart from pauses it gives a certain tone to a sentence for instance “you look good.” “you look good!” in both the sentences everything is same except one of it having a full stop and other an exclamation mark, yet the tone differs.
There are 14 punctuation marks that are commonly used in English grammar. They are the period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, braces, apostrophe, quotation marks, and ellipsis., Each serving differently.
There are also certain rules to use them.
- For example a “re” should always be used with hyphen, e.g. re-exam.
- When using commas the last comma should be before and, e.g. “lemon, orange, lime ,and pomelo lime” and also not to use commas in indirect quote.
- Use of semicolon between independent clauses which are not joined by conjunctions.
- Exclamation marks are used for showing emotion, so using it in formal sentences would not be a good idea.
- Periods/full stops are used for Initials in names (examples: J.F. Kennedy, Robert E.Lee), Latin abbreviations that need no explanation (example: e.g., i.e.),Contraction (example: Dr., Ltd.).
- Abbreviations end in lower case/small letters (example: Dec. for December).
There are many rules to it, which might not be that frequently used and might be obscured in this age of not so formal writing because this generation want shortcuts! But that has got nothing with the fact that we need punctuations as much as we need light bulbs.