punctuation

«punctuation» in Mova's school dictionary: the set of marks we use in writing, such as full stops… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (punctuation, uncountable); verb related: punctuate (punctuates, punctuated)

meaning for a pupil

1) Punctuation is the set of marks we use in writing, such as full stops, commas, question marks and apostrophes, to make the meaning clear and show where to pause. tree →

2) Punctuation is also the way you use these marks: «Check your punctuation». tree →

sense in the lessons

In English lessons, punctuation is taught with grammar and spelling (GPS, SPaG): capital letters and full stops, commas in lists, question and exclamation marks, apostrophes for missing letters and possession, speech marks (inverted commas), brackets, dashes, colons, semicolons and hyphens. Good punctuation helps the reader: «Let's eat, Grandma!» vs «Let's eat Grandma!» Phrases: «punctuation marks», «check your punctuation», «correct punctuation».

examples

• Remember your punctuation: capital letter at the start, full stop at the end. tree →
• A question mark is a punctuation mark. tree →
• Commas save lives: «Let's eat, Grandma!» tree →
• My teacher said my punctuation in speech was excellent. tree →
• Use speech marks around the words a character says. tree →
• The test had ten punctuation questions. tree →
• Without punctuation, the sentence was hard to read. tree →
• Americans call a full stop a «period». tree →

note

Uncountable: «good punctuation», not «punctuations»; for one mark say «a punctuation mark». In the USA: period (full stop), quotation marks (speech marks). Common traps: «its» (belonging) vs «it's» (it is); no apostrophe in simple plurals (apples, not apple's).

In the corpora

• Texts and chat messages often drop capitals and punctuation; school writing needs them.
• The punctuation that ends the spoken words goes inside the closing inverted commas.
• The grammar and punctuation paper takes 45 minutes and is worth 50 marks; the spelling test has 20 words.
• Writing is judged on things like paragraphs, cohesion, punctuation, spelling and a range of sentence types.
• "Was it a car or a cat I saw?" is a palindrome sentence once spaces, capitals and punctuation are ignored.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «punctuation» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.