Other Punctuation Marks

1. Other Punctuation Marks

2. Dashes can be used to interrupt a sentence to add information that you want to emphasize. Note that the information can come in the middle of the sentence or at the end. Example: The caretakers—those who are helpers, nurturers, teachers, mothers—are still systematically devalued. Example: Two of the strongest animals in the jungle are vegetarians—the elephant and the gorilla. Dash

3. Parentheses allow you to interrupt the sentence to add material that you want to deemphasize. Example: Though other cities (Dresden, for instance) had been utterly destroyed in World War II, never before had a single weapon been responsible for such destruction. Parentheses

4. Brackets are used to add material to quotations that was not there to begin with in order to make the sentence grammar work with the rest of the sentence. Example: Deborah Moore supports a student-centered curriculum and agrees with “current research [which] shows that successful learning takes place in an active environment” (22). Brackets

5. Use ellipsis points to indicate that information has been omitted. Ellipsis points are always a series of three dots with a space between each. The only time you see an ellipsis with four dots is at the end of a sentence when the fourth dot is the period that ends the sentence. On page 9, Goldman states “These two minds, the emotional and the rational, operate in tight harmony for the most part. . . .” Ellipsis points

6. For English classes, slashes tend to only be used to separate quoted lines of poetry. Example: W. H. Auden writes, “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position; how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just/walking dully along.” Slashes

7. Hyphens are sometimes used between a prefix and a root word. Please see page 305 of your Quick Access for the rules governing this. Hyphens

8. As I rerun the slideshow, write one sentence that uses each of these forms of punctuation correctly. Share yours with the class. Practice: