What is the difference between - ; and ,
@GajaGamini (1067)
India
November 10, 2012 6:39pm CST
English is very important today and we should aware about the rules and regulations regarding the thing which we want to learn or use. We discuss in English on Mylot and I know most of the Mylotters are native Americans and that is why they
must know the rules and regulations about using English in written or verbally.
As Mylot has members from many countries for them English would be second language just like me, we are not aware about the most of the English grammar segments and if we learn it we cannot implement it in real life or we forget it. As we Mylotters communicate by discussing we write or type whatever we want to convey and we do small, small mistakes which can be easily avoidable, I know, in this discussion I would have done many mistakes which I could avoid but I am learning to write English in proper way and learning things like where we should take paragraph, where we should use full stop and where we need to put comma and other things.
Punctuation is a segment where I need to improve and I know I do a lot of mistakes in punctuations and most of the punctuation marks I know but I don’t know what they called like ; - I guess it called Semicolon, : - this is colon, , - and this is comma, I guess I am right.
I want to this discuss about the punctuation marks we used in English and what are the rules and regulations they have and what are the things we should keep in mind while using them.
What are the punctuation marks you know and what they called?
6 responses
@GajaGamini (1067)
• India
20 Dec 12
Using commas and full stop is normal and general whilw writing because that are two thinga which make reading easier. we need to use comma is long sentences to make it understandable and w use full stop to finish the sentense.
@Fishmomma (11377)
• United States
11 Nov 12
People have answered your question well; however, I wanted to show you how I use them. I'll admit rarely use the colon and see a lot of people use a comma instead. Many times think people aren't sure what to use, so they just use whatever they feel like using at the time.
Words in a sentence: noun, verb, pronoun, and adjective. There are more just giving an example. Another thing I see often is missing periods.
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
11 Nov 12
The semicolon is not a commonly used piece of punctuation and I doubt if the majority of my countymen even know it's purpose.
It would be used in place of a comma if you were listing a number of items, but most people would still use a comma instead. I cannot remember ever using a semicolon myself.
Basically it is a rather old fashioned character and ceased to be in popular use a long time ago.
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
11 Nov 12
There have been many rules published about using punctuation correctly and you will find them very often ignored by some writers and editors, especially in fiction. You should also understand that certain types of writing have different rules. For example, legal documents have always tended to avoid the use of commas in particular and punctuation in general.
The best thing for a beginner is to learn to follow the basic rules from some such place as this: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-English-Punctuation-Correctly
Only once you are completely confident in using them according to these rules, will you be qualified to break them!
@stealthy (8181)
• United States
11 Nov 12
Unfortunately we Americans are not as proficient in the language as you assume us to be. Many of us never learned some of what you are writing about all that well and those who did have either forgotten it or are very careless in the usage. I had a very good education but it was weighted toward math and science and I can be very careless with the English side. On top of that I am very prone to typos and often don't catch a lot of them even when I read back over what I have typed. You have named the punctuation marks you showed in your discussion correctly. Where people, myself included, get into trouble is when they make their sentences too long. Often people should just end a sentence and start another one instead of putting in a lot of commas and semicolons. I am very bad about not following this advice. The colon, if I am remembering correctly, is mostly used when a list is going to follow or a minor title after a major title like in a movie sequel or something similar. One rule I learned about the colon which is not followed very well is that it should be followed by two spaces not just one unless it is followed by a list and then the list would be more likely to start on another line.
@jazzsue58 (2666)
•
11 Nov 12
I use the semicolon a lot when I write articles with long sentences. One place I use it is in the first paragraph of news articles, because the general rule of thumb seems to be "only one full stop allowed".
It's a useful device where there's a "sentence within a sentence" (i.e. two clauses) but you don't want to use a word like "and", "as" or "but" (a conjunction.) It also helps clarify a sentence where there's already a lot of commas.
Hope this helps; (as) I'm pretty new to the technicalities of grammar myself!
