Understanding proper punctuation is crucial in journalism. You can get creative with punctuation through the use of punctuation like long dashes. Here are the punctuation basics:
- Periods: used to separate full sentences or complete thoughts.
- Commas: used to create necessary pauses for maximum readability…..
- Long dashes (also called em dashes)
- Colons: used when specifically stating something (e.g. There was only one thing Doe wanted to do that day: sleep)
- Double quotation marks: used to signify quotes, emphasize certain words, and needed with movie, TV show, book, album, song, artwork, and various other titles.
- Single quotation marks: for quotes within quotes, e.g. “She was like, ‘You should seriously consider trying this sport,’ so I did,” Smith said.
- Semicolons: Avoid using to combine ideas. Split the idea into two sentences instead. However, semicolons are used to separate entries in complex lists (e.g. The candidates for the 2020 Student Congress election are First Last, former vice president; First Last, senior legislator; and First Last, sophomore political science major.)
- Ellipses: used to indicate when material was omitted from quotes. There is no need to put ellipses before or after a quote, but ellipses must be included if any part of the quote was removed, placed where the omitted content would be.
Remember: To save your completed answers as a .hp5 file or copy them to your clipboard, click the “reuse” button at the bottom of each exercise.
The next section of the AP Style resources is Avoiding Bias and Removing Opinion.