More on Punctuation Marks

Exclamation marks

In many informal communications these days, exclamation marks are becoming increasingly overused. They should be used only to convey such emotions as incredulity, shock and, as the name suggests, exclamation.

They are generally regarded as being informal and you should seek to avoid using them wherever possible, although using one on a rare occasion can be effective if properly employed.

Question marks

Question marks are, as they imply, used to indicate that the sentence is a question. They are placed at the end of question sentences. They have no other use.

The Ampersand

The ampersand (&), should rarely be used in writing prose. It is effectively an abbreviation for the word 'and'. You should only use it where you are quoting text that contains the ampersand, e.g. a company name or similar.

The ampersand is most generally associated with use for design purposes only.

Using Capital Letters

Capital letters, or uppercase, should be used sparingly and only in certain situations. Many people use capital letters too often and find it difficult to distinguish when is, and is not, appropriate to use them.

The first letter of every sentence, or fragment of a sentence, should be a capital letter. Within sentences, capitals should only be used in proper nouns, like days of the week, months or names. Capitals should also be used in official titles, for example the names of books or films, but conjoining words, like 'and', 'the', 'of' or 'on', should never have a capital letter. For example:

Monday
July
John F Kennedy
The Silence of the Lambs

Where an abbreviation is used that shortens a number of words to the initial letters of each word, capitals should be used for the abbreviation (see also the 'Language Tips' page). For example:

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
National Trust for Scotland (NTS)

Where the abbreviation itself has become a recognised word, capital letters should not be used, as in the use of the word 'laser'.

Numbers

When using numbers in your writing, the generally accepted rules are straightforward, if open to a little interpretation.

If the number is less than ten, the word should used. For example, write 'two' and not '2'.

If the number is more than ten, numerical digits can be used. This can, however, look out of place in normal prose. You will notice that many fiction writers will use words to express nearly all numbers up to 100. Once the number starts to get larger, it is far easier on the reader to express them numerically.

For numbers up to 9999, commas should not be used to separate the first digit from the latter three. For numbers of 10,000 or higher, a comma should be used, as shown. This makes the number easier to read.

If you have a sentence that starts with a number, you should attempt to reword the sentence to avoid having to start it with a number.

In technical or academic writing, however, it is often important that numbers stand out and can be readily found. For this reason, it is entirely appropriate to express all numbers numerically in technical or academic reports or assignments.

Paragraphs

In general terms, it is good practice to keep paragraphs short. This makes your writing more readable, especially if your writing is to be viewed on a web page. Indenting the first line of a paragraph is no longer considered necessary by most writers although some do still like to do so. When formatting your writing, ensure that a single line break appears between each paragraph, again for readability.