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Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. [1] English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; [2] and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. [3]
It is less commonly used to indicate a pause in speech or an unfinished thought or to separate items in material such as show business gossip. The stylebook indicates that if the shortened sentence before the mark can stand as a sentence, it should do so, with an ellipsis placed after the period or other ending punctuation.
Every conversation involves turn-taking, which means that whenever someone wants to speak and hears a pause, they do so. Pauses are commonly used to indicate that someone's turn has ended, which can create confusion when someone has not finished a thought but has paused to form a thought; in order to prevent this confusion, they will use a filler word such as um, er, or uh.
In Old English, the caesura has come to represent a pronounced pause in order to emphasize lines in Old English poetry that would otherwise be considered to be a droning, monotonous line. [5] This makes the caesura arguably more important to the Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could ...
During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD the Greek théseis —called distinctiones in Latin [a] —prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula, where each sentence was placed on its own ...
Because speech patterns (especially the places where people pause in sentences) vary widely, there's little point arguing about that either. Logic's a different matter. For example, putting the footnote number inside quotation marks is daft, because the number isn't part of the quotation.
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline.The most common versions are the en dash –, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash —, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar ―, whose length varies ...
The colon, :, is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, [1] or a quoted sentence. [2] It is also used between hours and minutes in time, [1] between certain elements in medical journal citations, [3] between chapter and verse in Bible citations, [4] and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other ...