How Important are the Punctuations Marks?

Introduction

What is the need of punctuations marks? Like many other students across Pakistan, I struggled with written English throughout my school life. The grammar, the vocabulary, the comprehension, and the sentence correction were some of the hard nuts to crack.  The punctuations marks were the toughest of all.

Whenever the English teacher gave an assignment regarding a paragraph or a story writing, it always resulted in a major assignment disaster because of incorrect punctuations marks usage. I was able to write the story/paragraph, and in my mind, it seemed perfect at the time. However, if I gave it a read sometime later, it seemed as if the text makes no sense at all.  I am sure that such a problem persists with many students.

The reason for such a problem is the wrong usage of punctuation marks. The main issue is that there are few teachers who can explain the concept of the punctuations marks clearly to their students. Since, in most cases, the teachers themselves have poor command over the punctuations, thus they fail to explain the phenomenon to their students clearly.

Importance of Punctuations Marks

The punctuations marks play the most important role in written English: it helps the reader to understand and make sense out of a written text. Without punctuation, the reader is susceptible to multiple judgments, and will not be able to grasp the main context out of the written text.

You might be tempted with the question that many people have made very decent careers without learning punctuations marks properly. So, why the need to learn punctuation when there is no use in professional life?

The simple answer would be that it would look very unprofessional when a high-ranking official makes such silly mistakes in office noting. Furthermore, if you are in a field where there is a high reliance on precise communication, then with improper punctuation you will not be able to perform your duties without embarrassment.

Learning to punctuate correctly is not that difficult. There are certain rules which, if understood properly, can significantly improve our writing and punctuation. We will now discuss and explain punctuations marks briefly.

The Types of Punctuation Marks

There are numerous types of punctuations marks. The most commonly used marks are also the most easiest, and includes the full stop, the question mark, and the exclamation mark. The comma is a little bit confusing, but once you understand its types and specific usage, it becomes easy. Similarly, the colon, the semicolon, the apostrophe, the hyphen, and the dashes are least used marks but their usage is important to know for formal written English.

Furthermore, there are certain best practices regarding capital letters, abbreviations, quotations, italics, boldface, small capitals, parentheses, square brackets, the ellipsis, the slash, rules for the numerals, headings, footnotes, references, and bibliography, among others. All these topics will be covered briefly one by one in the next write-up. Till then stay tuned!