It’s one of the trickiest punctuation dilemmas: when you are using direct speech, and you break what the speaker says, do you put the comma before or after the closing quotation mark? Should it be ‘I went shopping’, Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’. or ‘I went shopping,’ Tim said, ‘to
Colons, like semicolons, are a sadly neglected punctuation mark. They deserve to have their versatility recognised and used far more widely. Unlike semicolons, which have two functions (see my earlier post on ‘What do I use a semicolon for?’), colons have a number of uses. Here are the seven main uses for a colon. The
It seems quite simple: we use a full stop to end a sentence and a question mark to end a question. But sometimes it can be a bit tricky working out whether we are dealing with a question or statement. One category where writers often become confused is with indirect speech. If the sentence is