With his necessarily selective, yet well-balanced, lucid, and highly competent study Dr Parkes has impressively refuted the common notion that
punctuation marks are just minor accessories.
Not that curvy little thing you see in the last sentence, which looks more like a boomerang than it does a
punctuation mark -- which may be warning us that if we try to throw it out, it'll just come right back anyway.
The
punctuation mark in this case is possessive, so its only correct use would be thus: "1960's first month (that is, the first month of 1960) showed a downturn in house prices ..."
End marks are those
punctuation marks that indicate the end of a sentence.
He said: "Although I think it is important pupils continue to develop their literacy skills, even after leaving school, I do not think it is the end of the world if they don't know how to use
punctuation marks properly and otherwise bright pupils shouldn't be penalised for making the odd mistake.
Next to the comma, the apostrophe is probably the most misused of
punctuation marks. Consider that there is an Apostrophe Protection Society in England that exists purely to protect and correct the uses of this noble squiggle.
Dawkins describes a "hierarchy of the essential syntactic
punctuation marks" (period, semicolon, colon, dash, comma, and zero) that he associates with "five basic syntactic structures" (independent clause, independent clause with an introducer, independent clause with an interrupter, independent clause with a concluder, and compounded independent clauses).
Consider the difference between "The convict said the judge is mad" and "The convict, said the judge, is mad"; and "A woman, without her man, is nothing" and "A woman: without her, man is nothing." Though
punctuation marks are conventions designed to facilitate reading, they are neither arbitrary nor picayune for clear and complex expression.
Use pots as
punctuation marks at the ends of flowerbeds too, or as features in the centre of a formal bed or paved circle at the crossroads between the different "rooms".
Other features include support for multiple users on a single PC, a built-in tool window to enable fast inputting of
punctuation marks, and a handwriting recognition component.
The writer of concrete poetry uses typeface and other typographical elements in such a way that chosen units--letter fragments,
punctuation marks, graphemes (letters), morphemes (any meaningful linguistic unit), syllables, or words--and graphic spaces form an evocative picture.
What Kosuth probably envisions in all his installations was made crystal clear here:
punctuation marks (comma, parentheses, etc.) made of neon tubing appeared as windows to the world, like daylight entering from the outside.
I certainly wish Brother Rubin well in his mission to educate the country about the proper role of our
punctuation marks. There's no question in my mind that something needs to be done about their use and abuse.
Birmingham City Council voted yesterday to scrap the use of possessive
punctuation marks on street names throughout the city, claiming it will avoid confusion.
