Tag Archives: Full stops

Full stop or question mark?

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

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Full stops and other shortened words (measurements, acronyms and initialisms)

Measurements There is a very simple rule with abbreviations for metric measurements: you never use a full stop with them. mm, cm, m, km ml, L g, kg, kJ ha (I have to confess that I don’t know what Americans do, but, on the whole, Americans don’t use the metric system, so it probably isn’t

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In a dot-point list, does each item start with a capital letter and end with a full stop?

No and no. In Australia, the widespread convention is that each item in a dot-point list starts with a lower-case letter; you can think of each point as ‘finishing’ the sentence that introduces the list. You only need to finish a point with a full stop if the point contains more than one sentence, otherwise

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