Thursday, June 28, 2007

The Use of Punctuation on Transcriptions

We've read an article made by Blogie, "Do the dots", that talk about the reasons why punctuations are important.

Most people get away with using just 3 kinds: the period, the comma and the question mark. But if you’re serious about writing, knowing how to use more of these written symbols will help you get your message across much more clearly.

Punctuation marks are used to help you organize your thoughts, so that you can convey them in the way that you intend. Conversely, misuse — and especially abuse — of punctuation can result in misunderstanding, in your failure to communicate properly. Or worse: your inability to properly use colons, apostrophes, dashes, etc. could make you look, well, rather lacking in intellectual acuity.


Is this true? Yes, it is.

Another weakness is the semicolon. It’s hardly ever used in most blogs I’ve seen, and is used improperly in some cases. The basic idea behind this colon-and-comma hybrid is that, there is a strong relationship between the two parts of the sentence being separated by the semicolon, so much so that using a period might cancel such relationship. A good example would be a sentence containing statements of cause and effect.

Another use of the semicolon is as a list delimiter. In this case, the list items contain internal punctuation, so that using a comma to separate the items might cause confusion.


Aw! We're guilty. Thanks! Blogie. We've learned some tips there.

1 comment:

Kerry Hancock Jr said...

This is a great post. Simple and critical to a serious blogger. I personally consider myself terrible when it comes to punctuation/grammar/spelling so I can really appreciate this post. Keep up the great info. www.houseofhancock.com