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Punctuation and Spelling

This video looks at punctuation and spelling, which are important in academic and professional writing.

Punctuation refers to marks such as full stops, commas, colons, semi colons, and apostrophes. It also refers to spacing within the text. Although these marks are very small, they can change the meaning of the sentence. Legal cases have been lost because of a comma in the wrong place! For example: “eats shoots and leaves” is very different in meaning to “eats, shoots and leaves”.

Full stops

Let’s look first at full stops, which Americans refer to as a ‘period’.

As you probably know, a full stop goes at the end of a sentence to show that the sentence is finished. We also use question marks for questions and exclamation marks for emphasis.

Be careful to use a full stop, not a comma, to separate two independent clauses.

Commas

Commas add extra information to a sentence and signal a pause to the reader.

Look to this sentence and notice the pauses where the commas are:

• In many cases, the total time that students spent on various activities on mobile devices added up to far more than an hour, which suggests that they multitasked frequently.

There are two situations in which commas often cause problems for students. Firstly, commas are used after adverbial expressions at the beginning of a sentence. For example,

• In addition,
• However,
• In 2009,
• In recent years,

The other situation where we use a comma is for adding extra information, such as in a non-defining relative clause. For example,

• In many cases, the total time that students spent on various activities on mobile devices added up to far more than an hour, which suggests that they multitasked frequently (Roberts & Rees, 2014).

Look at the video on ‘complex sentences’ to find out more about adding extra information to a sentence and the use of commas and full stops.

Colons

Now let’s turn to colons. This mark is used to introduce a list. For example:

• There were three main issues: economic, geographic, and political.

The colon means ‘which is’ or ‘which are’, so when we use a colon we don’t need to use these words.

Semi-colon

The semi colon is not frequently used in everyday writing but is more common in academic texts. There are three occasions when it is useful. The first situation is after some linking words such as however, consequently, hence, accordingly, nevertheless and thus. We use a semi colon when you have two closely related independent clauses, like this:

• Several attempts to resolve the situation were made; however, none of these were successful.
• Of these patients, 10 were not enrolled; thus, the cohort was composed of 167 patients for the trial.

Semi colons can also be used instead of a full stop in cases where sentences are independent but the meaning is closely related:

• Some people work best in the morning; others work better later in the day.

The third use is to differentiate when we have long items in a list. For example:

• The case involved three people: Mr Brown, who lived in Ipswich and was married; Mrs Smith, who lived on the Gold Coast and was single; and Mr Jones, who lived in Brisbane and was divorced.

In this example, you can see a combination of punctuation marks.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes are another important punctuation mark in English, and even native speakers make mistakes with them. An apostrophe does two things. Firstly, it shows that a letter is missing, for example:

• ‘it’s’ means ‘it is’
• ‘we’re’ means ‘we are’, and
• ‘don’t’ means ‘do not’.

These are called contractions. It is generally better to avoid contractions in academic writing.

Secondly, apostrophes can be used to show possession. For example:

• John’s research
• Neil’s publications

However, the possession apostrophe tends to be used only with people. For other nouns, we use alternative ways of showing possession, for example by making the words into a compound noun.

• Griffith University (not Griffith’s University)
• the office door (not the office’s door)

And apostrophes aren’t used with possessive pronouns such as:

• theirs
• ours
• its

The other tricky area with the possession apostrophe is knowing where to put it. The sentence ‘the teacher’s book’ could be written in two ways:

• The teacher’s book
• The teachers’ book

In the first sentence, the book belongs to one teacher. In the second sentence, there is one book that belongs to more than one teacher.

Spacing

One key thing to remember about punctuation is where to put a space. A punctuation mark comes directly after a word. A space is thenneeded directly after the punctuation mark.

Punctuation and formatting are very important in academic writing, especially for referencing. Look at the video on referencing for more on this topic.

Spelling

Now let’s turn to spelling. This is a very complex area and unfortunately there are not many easy rules! As you know, in English there is often little connection between the pronunciation of a word and its spelling so it is sometimes impossible to know how to pronounce a word from how it is spelt. For example, there are many different pronunciations of O-U-G-H.

• ought
• through
• enough

For this reason, it is good to know how to read phonetic script in a dictionary, like this:

There are also differences in American and British English spelling. For example: colour, centre, and travelling. É«ÇéÍøÕ¾ tends to use British spelling. Both American and British spelling are usually acceptable for lecturers and tutors, but it’s important to be consistent and not change styles.

Spelling is very important as mistakes create a very poor impression on the reader, particularly in academic and professional writing, and you may lose marks if you spell words incorrectly. Fortunately, the spell checker on your computer helps to make this easier, so make sure that this is turned on, and that the language is set to É«ÇéÍøÕ¾n English. Then, look out for any red underlined words that show a spelling mistake. If your spell checker program gives you alternatives, be careful to choose the correct one. Always make sure that you read through your work and don’t rely on the program to find all the spelling mistakes. Another reason that you need to pay attention is because the program will miss words that you have spelled correctly but are actually incorrectly applied - for example, if you write ‘form’ instead of ‘from’.

The other thing to do is to raise your awareness of the words that you are having difficulty spelling. You’ll probably find that there are several words that you spell consistently wrong, so it’s important to note these down and revise them. If you are having difficulty, focus on just five words a day and keep testing yourself.

This video has looked at punctuation and spelling, two very important areas for academic writing. For practice, try the exercises below.