Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Punctuation Cheat Sheet
Punctuation Cheat Sheet
Comma(sutra):
Use a comma to set apart introductory words, phrases, clauses (as in a complex
sentence with the dependent clause first)
o Honestly, it’s cold.
o To win the game, Jenny needed skill and luck.
o Although I love chocolate, I can’t eat any now.
To separate clauses in a compound sentence by using a comma and conjunction
(using a comma without the conjunction is called a comma splice)
o I love chocolate, and I will eat some now.
o Common conjunctions…FANBOYS – for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so
To set off a nonrestrictive (not necessary) element or an appositive (renames the
subject)
o Alicia, my sister, is eighteen.
o The two drivers involved in the accident, who have been convicted of
drunken driving, should lose their license.
Comma continued…
To separate coordinating adjectives that describe the same noun.
o The icy, slick road led to the ski resort.
To separate items in a series/list (comma before the last item is optional)
o I ate pizza, milk, peas, and carrots
To set off most quotations
o “All I know about grammar,” said Joan Didion, “is its infinite power.”
Dash(it-all):
Use a dash to indicate a sudden break or change in the sentence or parenthetical
material.
o Near the semester’s end – and this is not always due to poor planning –
some students may find themselves in a real crunch.
To set off an introductory series/list
o A good book, a cup of tea, a comfortable chair – these things always save
my sanity.
To indicate interrupted speech
o John, why are you –
For emphasis (the colon and dash are interchangeable here)
o After years of trial and error, Belther made history with his invention – the
unicycle.
Use quotes…
to punctuate titles of songs, poems, short stories, one-act plays, lectures, episodes
of radio or tv episodes, chapters of books, song titles, articles from the
newspaper/magazine. (small things)
to emphasize or distinguish a word or a specialized use of a word. (You can also
use italics for this)
o Tom pushed the wheelchair across the street, showed the lady his “honest”
smile, and stole her purse.
to punctuate actual quotations.
o Place commas and periods INSIDE quotes unless you are using MLA
format parenthetical citations
“I am not very good at math” (Bell 27).
o Place exclamation points and question marks inside quotes when they
punctuate the quotation and outside quotes when they punctuate the
sentence
“Am I dreaming?”
Had she heard him say, “Here’s the key to your new car”?
o ALWAYS place semicolons or colons OUTSIDE quotation marks.
I wrote about Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird”; his other poem was too deep for me.
When you have a quote within a quote, use single quotation marks.
o Sue asked, “Did you hear him say, ‘I like snow’?”
For quotes longer than 4 lines, single space, indent whole quotation, and do not
use quotation marks.