“Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart… good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it’s done.”
—John Mayer
And I must say, the same goes for men, too. For ladies, men with good grammar and punctuation skills check all the boxes on the list. Punctuation marks are not just fancy symbols to add to your sentences. They are “necessities”. Your work would be naked and your soul barren without them. And as John Lennard said in his book, The Poetry Handbook, “Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to the bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.”
They are the indicators that help the writer to take short pauses, long pauses, tell the readers if they are questioning something, show emotion, or just pass on information. Coming from the Greek word, “Punctus”, which means “point”, punctuation marks give meaning to the sentence. Without proper punctuation inserts, the meaning of your sentence would completely be changed. And the most quoted example for the same is:
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
One comma can save grandma from being eaten by her grandkid!
According to Britannica, “Punctuation is the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts.” There are a total of 14 types of punctuation marks, which attends to a different meaning of the sentence.
So now let’s start with the seven most important punctuation marks, and make your sentence better.