I've been posting about grammar recently, and this latest post focuses on punctuation.

In the beginning, there were words, and the words were written without any punctuation or even gaps in between.

And the ancient Greeks saw that this was not good, and they added some dots (ancestors of the colon) to the text, so that it wouldn’t be all Greek to us.

The idea was these marks would tell the various orators and actors when to pause to take a breath, but gradually, as people began to read printed texts silently to themselves, the number and purposes of punctuation increased. It wouldn’t be grammar without some form of classification, so here are the different types of punctuation you might come across.

Terminal points

Here we find the full stop (.) or period, as the Americans say; the exclamation mark (!), which the Americans call the exclamation point; and the question mark (?), which the Americans seem happy with as a title. See more about punctuation marks.

Pause points

If you don’t wait to interrupt the flow too firmly, you can insert some pause points. One of these is the hardest working punctuation mark in show business, the comma (,), which separates items on lists (as seen here), adjectives modifying a noun (a busy, exhausted, happy comma), shows where another clause begins in a sentence, or adds a less formal pause in quoting direct speech.

The remaining two pause points – the colon (:) and the semi-colon (;) – tend to scare the unprepared writer, but they can help get people out of all kinds of comma-based difficulties. Find out more about colon punctuation.

Hyphens and dashes

Another trans-Atlantic divide that rears up once we look at those little lines that divide text – the hyphen and the dash. The two classes of marks are confused quite a lot anyway, with only the hyphen appearing on conventional keyboards.

The hyphen (-) is the shortest, and should only be used to join compound words together (get-together, for example), whereas the dash comes in two different lengths. The en-dash (–) is the shorter of the two, is surrounded by spaces, and tends to be used more frequently in British English, while the em-dash (—) is longer yet, without any gaps between it and the text.

Other common punctuation marks

Taking up the remaining positions in the team are the apostrophe (‘), quotation marks (“”) or inverted commas (‘’), the slash – or virgule (/), parentheses (( )) and brackets ([ ]), and the dramatic fader, the ellipsis (…). Fine out more about punctuation rules, dialogue punctuation and the hedera punctuation.