Tricky Punctuation in Cartoons
Lidia Stanton
Illustrated by Sophie Kennedy
For Lucas, not because his writing wasn’t perfect,but because it was.
Contents
Introduction to Educators and Parents
1. Why We Need Punctuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2. Capital Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3. Full Stop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4. Exclamation Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5. Question Mark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
6. Listing Comma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
7. Serial (Oxford) Comma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
8. Name-Separating Comma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
9. Clause the Santa Claus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
10. Comma Separating Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
11. Main and ‘Sub’ Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
12. Comma after Fronted Adverbials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
13. Commas ‘Hugging’ a Subordinate Clause. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
14. Relative Clauses and Puppies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
15. Two or More Main Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
16. Commas – Putting It All Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
17. Colon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
18. Semicolon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
19. Dash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
20. Brackets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
21. Parenthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
27. How to Solve a Problem like Zed?
Introduction to Educators and Parents
Correct punctuation:
the difference between
a sentence that’s well-written
and a sentence that’s, well, written.
Anonymous
Why another reference guide?
This book does not aspire to be another English language reference guide. Its purpose is to make the correct use of punctuation marks achievable for those who rarely use them in places other than the end of a sentence. The book’s humour-packed content is designed to be easily processed and hard to put down. References to social media humour make it relevant to young people’s everyday experience of electronic literacy.
Most of all, the book’s aim is to demystify a belief that punctuation, like spelling and grammar, is difficult to learn if one does not have strong academic skills, is less of a logical thinker, or has a specific learning difficulty, such as dyslexia. Punctuation does make a lot of sense, but that may not be obvious to someone who does not find traditional SPAG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) classroom instruction or reference guides helpful. This book hopes to ignite, or re-ignite, curiosity about punctuation that might have been lost on some academic journeys.
Who
