Quotation Marks: Quotation marks are typically under-utilized by students. They can protect you from plagiarism, they help with adding dialogue to something, and they can go around words that are tricky to define. • YES: In the article by Dr. James Johnson, he declares that, “Cramming knowledge into one’s head the night before will causes headaches, not great test grades.” • YES: Then my mom said, “Please don’t quote me in this essay you are writing; I don’t want to sound stupid.” • YES: I wanted to ask him what he thought of the “party” we went to because it was weird.
Capitalization: The majority of students already know that capitalization is used for the first word of a sentence, for the names of people and of proper nouns, and when dealing with titles of books, movies, magazines, web sites, etc. The issues seen sometimes are usually centered around oddball items like titles of classes, titles of degrees, etc. YES: I took History 101 because it was required for my major. YES: Sybil, Ronda, and Dana have their Master’s degrees.
Hyphens & Dashes: The difference between hyphens and dashes is that hyphens are used IN words and dashes are not. Dashes are used in a similar way to how parenthesis function. YES: Three unlikely people - a witch, a pastor, and a bishop - all walked into a bar. Hyphens join two parts of a compound word like brother-in-law or five-years-old.
Parenthesis: Speaking of parenthesis, parenthesis are to be used to add extra remarks within a sentence. YES: Be sure to call me (extension 2346) when you get this message. YES: My brother (Jed) works in Fargo.
Ellipses: Ellipses are pauses in dialogue/speech and are rarely more than three periods… so, please stop using seventeen.
Mechanics: The Basic Comma Rules 1. Use a comma with a coordinating conjunction to join two or more sentences. In Layman’s terms, fix a comma splice by adding one of the following: and, but, for, so, or, nor, or yet. 2. Use a comma to set off non-essential information in a sentence. Basically, put commas around extra information that is not part of the main idea. See #4 in Sentence Patterns.
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