Punctuation

Much of punctuation is arbitrary, except for the period and question mark. However, there are sound rules worth mastering, for the use of punctuation to make things clearer or reading easier. Included here from the author´s book The Careful Writer are commentary on use of the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation marks, and semicolon.