Punctuation, the original purpose of which was elocutionary, evolved a syntactic purpose as silent reading became more common. Despite the great similarity of punctuation rules among handbooks and manuals, punctuation has not been completely standardized. Punctuation practices vary from genre to genre, and the "best" fiction and…

Written to provide a quick, simple, practical reference, this handbook contains explanations and examples of the use of English. Entries, arranged alphabetically, may be as specific as "bibliography,""colons,""dashes,""footnotes," and "prefixes" or as general as articles on cliches, books, figurative language, frame tests, grammar, and plagiarism.…

The paper's first section discusses the connection between personalized reading and punctuation for young primary grade students, with some specific sentences and teaching ideas. Next, the paper describes 10 kinds of written work, done for specific purposes, that may be used with early primary students to emphasize this personalized connection. It…

Explains and illustrates some rarely explained and often underemphasized punctuation principles. (AEA)

Titular colonicity (presence of colon in title) is shown to index the progress of scholarship over a century. Analysis of 1,150 titles in education, psychology, and literary criticism reveals use of the colon in the majority of contemporary titles across disciplines, thereby demonstrating the progressive complexity of scholarship. (Author/MLW)

Describes the effectiveness of grammar, punctuation, and spelling review sessions in improving journalism students' writing. (KS)

Responds to letters from readers in response to recent "Research" columns. Deals with the issues of learning disabilities, whole language approach, the "skills" perspective, junk food textbooks, and punctuation. (RS)

Points to introspective evidence that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language. Suggests that some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. (RAE)

Research with adults has shown that the distortion of visual word features, and in particular of the multiletter features within words, hampers word recognition. In this study, "CaSe MiXiNg" was employed to examine the effect of disrupting visual word features on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge in children. During the training, 18…

Good writing is good sentences. It is a simple truth that many in the business of teaching writing have strayed from. Good writing is a first sentence that makes a reader want to read the second sentence, a second sentence that makes a reader want to read the third, and so on. Erika Lindemann suggests that certain types of sentence instruction can…

Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

A detailed step-by-step description of a punctuation proficiency project utilizing a pretest, practice, and post-test plan is provided. (BP)

Provides a brief history of Chinese punctuation and detailed analysis of modern Chinese punctuation. Three tables show: 1) uniquely Chinese punctuation markers; 2) markers graphemically identical and functionally similar to Western markers; and 3) markers graphemically identical but functionally different from Western markers. Each punctuation…