Tutorial
Section 2: Punctuation
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As Theodore Bernstein stated [7], punctuation marks are the traffic signs that help readers navigate sentences. In this analogy, you can think of a period as a stop sign and a comma as a yield sign. In scientific writing, such signs are important. For instance, a mistake in punctuation, such as a missing comma, can force the audience to reread the sentence to gather the intended meaning. Besides periods and commas, another important piece of punctuation is the colon, which can introduce a complex list or an equation. Of lesser importance are the em-dash and semicolon. Still, these two pieces of punctuation occur often enough in scientific writing that they warrant attention.
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If you selected all of the correct answers on the Kahoot, you can move to the next section: Usage. However, if you missed questions, you should work through the films and quizzes (below) that correspond to those missed questions.
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Congratulations on finishing the punctuation section.
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References
- Peg Tyre, "The Writing Revolution," The Atlantic Monthly (October 2012), pp. 99-100.
- Catherine Walker, "Time to Stop Avoiding Grammar Rules," The Guardian (September 2012).
- Tessa Schlesinger, "Why Grammar Matters," Owlcation (7 September 2017).
- Michael Alley, The Craft of Scientific Writing, 4th ed. (New York: Springer, 2018), Appendices A, B, and C.
- Cheryl Glenn and Loretta Gray, The Writer's Harbrace Handbook, 5th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2012).
- William A. Sabin, The Gregg Reference Manual: A Manual of Style, Grammar, Usage, and Formatting, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010).
- Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1995).
