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Punctuation
Everything any American needs to know about punctuation including how punctuation reads and the rules for using the punctuation marks and indicators.The award-winning author has two writing instructionals in print and has published a great deal of fiction as well as nonfiction over the years.Miki had taught at Writer's Digest University for the past 12 years.
60 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 6, 2012
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About the author
G. Miki Hayden
40 books35 followersG. Miki Hayden, strongly believes in alternate universes and has written about them in her adult novels Pacific Empire (which won a New York Times rave) and New Pacific. “Nothing in time-space is fixed,” Miki says, a distant look in her eyes. Miki won an Edgar for an historical crime story and has a couple of writing books in print. At the moment, she generally lives with millions of other people in New York City in a three-dimensional, temporal world but is exploring other realms.
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June 30, 2014
As a writer, I take advantage of opportunities to refresh my knowledge of the basic rules. Btw, look carefully at the punctuation mark on the cover. It is not what you think. At least, it wasn't what I thought. I was surprised to learn that I was wrong--and what it means.
The rules of punctuation are to make it easy for the reader; writing isn't just words; it's about how to emphasize them. I appreciated the easy-to-understand rules--and the examples. I'm less fuzzy now about which punctuation marks go inside the double quotes and which don't, among other things.
Learning that you don't need to use italics when writing thoughts was a relief. And I learned only recently that we probably don't need to underline words to be printed in italics, and we now only put one space at the end of a sentence. That is a hard habit to break! (And you'll notice that I've only used one exclamation mark so far. I tend to overuse them, along with parentheses.) Be sure to study the section on apostrophes.
The elipsis explanation really helped me, and the serial comma explanation made me feel better. (I have not given up the last serial comma, btw.) A number of things were clarified for me, including what to use inside a parenthesis (brackets); I'd been using more parentheses. And there are quizzes at the end, if you want to test yourself. This was an easy and enjoyable read, and the author was firm, but not dogmatic. Highly recommended for those who write, whether it's fiction or reports or a blog. And the author makes it fun.
The rules of punctuation are to make it easy for the reader; writing isn't just words; it's about how to emphasize them. I appreciated the easy-to-understand rules--and the examples. I'm less fuzzy now about which punctuation marks go inside the double quotes and which don't, among other things.
Learning that you don't need to use italics when writing thoughts was a relief. And I learned only recently that we probably don't need to underline words to be printed in italics, and we now only put one space at the end of a sentence. That is a hard habit to break! (And you'll notice that I've only used one exclamation mark so far. I tend to overuse them, along with parentheses.) Be sure to study the section on apostrophes.
The elipsis explanation really helped me, and the serial comma explanation made me feel better. (I have not given up the last serial comma, btw.) A number of things were clarified for me, including what to use inside a parenthesis (brackets); I'd been using more parentheses. And there are quizzes at the end, if you want to test yourself. This was an easy and enjoyable read, and the author was firm, but not dogmatic. Highly recommended for those who write, whether it's fiction or reports or a blog. And the author makes it fun.
Displaying 1 of 1 review