About this ebook
Two hundred uses of every mark in English, each printed with a correctly punctuated example and the same words punctuated wrongly beside it. That pairing is the method. Punctuation errors are almost never failures of knowledge - everybody agrees a comma splice is wrong once it is pointed out. The difficulty is seeing one in your own writing.
Six parts, in the order the marks cause trouble: the sentence and how to end one, the comma and its eight separate jobs, the apostrophe, the colon and semicolon and dash that most adults avoid for want of ever being shown what they are for, quotation marks and brackets, and capitals, hyphens, numbers and lists.
Written to British practice, with American convention given in full wherever the two genuinely differ. Where the question is open the book says so and recommends consistency rather than a side. With a twelve-point checklist at the back for anything you are about to send.
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About the author
Alex Carter writes practical English books for people who use the language at work and in ordinary life rather than in a classroom. The books are built around complete examples - real sentences, real situations - on the principle that one worked example teaches more than a page of rules.
