Punct(ure)uations!!!

Punctuations!!! Ahh!! The worst part in English, right? I get dragged back to my school days when along with by-hearting the poem, i also by-hearted the punctuations. Commas, Semicolons and Colons; they used to take the hell out of me.

I went through few books where i could find the actual usage of punctuations. Really felt good about punctuations then. So for those who still get confused with the devil of English language, here is the solution.

Colon: It indicates that what follows is the explanation to what precedes it. What precedes the colon should always be a complete sentence and what follows it may be a sentence, a phrase or even a single word.

For ex: One Name dominates indian cricket these days: Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

A colon is never to be followed by a hyphen. A mistake that most of us commit.

A colon can never follow "including". And using including is way better than using a colon, because it would make the statement sound simpler. So a good news for us. But, newaz, the gist is "Try making the statement sound simple".


Semicolon: Its only function is to connect two COMPLETE sentences which meet the following criteria: (1) They are felt to be too closely connected to each other that they cannot be separated by a full stop; (2) they are not joined by any connecting words, such as and, or, but or while; (3) They do not meet the requirements for a colon.

For ex: Men are from Mars; Women from Venus.

However, a sentence like "On 26th November Mumbai was shaken by a horrifying event; the terrorist attack." . Here the required punctuation is a colon.


Comma: It has 4 different uses. Make sure to use comma only in the four below mentioned cases.

(1) It is used to separate a list of items. For ex: x,y,z. Normally a comma never preceeds "and" or "or" unless to avoid ambiguity. For example: My favourite movie is Shall we Dance, You and Me, and Casanova.

(2) It is used as a joining comma when two complete sentences are joined. This is possible only when comma is followed by a suitable connecting word like and, or, but, otherwise, etc. If a suitable connecting word is not present, a comma is not possible, and a semicolon should be used. For ex: A goal in football gives 1 point, while a goal in basketball gives 2 or 3.

(3) The other form is called gapping comma which is used to denote words that have been omitted. For ex: Italy is famous for its Pizzas; India, for its Vada pavs.

(4) the last form is called bracketing comma which sets off a weak interruption to a sentence. For ex: The white tiger, published in 2008, was a best-seller. The statement "published in 2008" is not essential and hence is a weak interruption.


These are the rules with British English. They might vary for American English, but not much. Our English highly influenced by British English and hence this should serve the purpose.

Hope you people don't have hard times understanding and using punctuations now. Happy Punctuating.!!!

Disclaimer: To some it might sound the most boring blog ever read. The author is not responsible,in any way, for the lose of temper resulting anytime while reading.