User:OrenBochman/Punctuation
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- Spacing. Periods (full-stops), commas, semicolons (; ), colons (: ), and question and exclamation marks are normally spaced to the right and not to the left. There is no guideline on whether to use one space or two after the end of a sentence, but the difference is visible only in the edit window.
- Upper-case letters. Colons and semicolons don't normally force a capital letter in the subsequent word.
- Serial commas. A serial comma (also called an Oxford or Harvard comma) can be inserted before a conjunction in a list (ham, chips, and eggs), but can also be omitted (ham, chips and eggs). Where including or omitting the comma avoids ambiguity, this should be done.*
- Comma splices. They cause the reader to stumble: Oranges are an acid fruit, bananas are classified as alkaline. Correct these two independent statements to Oranges are an acid fruit; bananas are classified as alkaline, or use a comma plus a coordinating conjunction such as and or but.
- Semicolons. The converse to a comma splice is this: Although he had been here before; I did not recognize him. Use a comma, since the second statement depends entirely on the first (through Although).
- Colons. Use only one colon per sentence, and don't do this :- or this :– . A colon can introduce an inline list, after which use either semicolons or commas as boundaries between the items.
- Apostrophe glyphs. Straight ( ' ), not curly ( ’ ).
- Other signs. Use exclamation marks with restraint. Don't use clusters of question marks or exclamation marks.
- Punctuation and inline citations. Inline citations are placed after any punctuation such as a comma or period, with no intervening space; e.g., ... are venomous.
<ref>The definition of this word depends on ...</ref>, yielding ... are venomous.[1].* - Leakage. Restrict formatting such as bold and italics to what should properly be affected by it, and not the punctuation that is part of the surrounding sentence.*
- Slashes. Avoid joining two words by a (forward) slash ( / ); in particular, and/or is often awkward and sometimes ambiguous. Reword if possible.* *
- Number signs. The album was Number 1 in the charts or No. 1 in the charts, not № 1 or #1.*
Discussion
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