Punctuation, Part 2

Tres Mas! In this post I will once again be looking at the Punctuation section of the textbook for advice. This time, I will be analyzing the text's advice on colons, quotation marks, and other punctuation marks. I will be talking about these topics in reference to my own draft as well. And eve though I don't talk about apostrophes in this post, the picture below made me giggle so I had to include it.

Hollacaine "Punctuation" 10/21/14 via reddit.

The colon

I feel like this is slightly similar to the semicolon in that I am wary of using it incorrectly. In high school my English teachers always said that if you have more than one semicolon or colon in an essay then you were using it wrong. I never really thought this was true, but I conformed for the sake of my grade. However now I need to start using more because I know I need them. This chapter clarified when exactly to use colons a bit. I knew about the listing aspect, but what was new for me was the quotation usage of colons. I didn't really know that this was an option to use a colon right before a quote, and I feel like it could be really useful.

In my own draft, I was able to (hopefully effectively) utilize this punctuation:

"Hu strengthens her claims with Sapolsky’s own words: 'People just don’t want to hear anything negative… You want to believe this fairy tale; it’s magical' (Hu 4)."

Previously, I had been having problems with the wordiness of the introduction to the quote. But I thing that the colon sort of helps the quote be more impactful in the paper.


Quotation marks

I learned more than I was expecting to in reading this chapter. For one, I got some concrete rules to make sure that I was quoting correctly, and that made me feel better. But the major insight here was in long quotations. I hadn't known that by indenting the long text you imply that it is word for word, and therefore you don't need quotations. This was especially applicable to when I use and except of the transcript of Koko's chat from my source (look at me, I'm using a colon to introduce this quote, look at me all learning and stuff):

Question: Do you like to chat with other people?

Koko: fine nipple

Patterson: Nipple rhymes with people, she doesn’t sign people per se, she was trying   to do a ‘sounds like… (Hu 2).

I had originally included quotations, but after reading this chapter I realize that the indentation makes this unnecessary, so I fixed it. I'm pretty sure I have been doing this wrong my whole life so this is kind of really important for me actually.


Other punctuation marks

I found this chapter interesting because there are a lot of punctuations in here that I'm a little hesitant to use. For instance, the dash. I feel like in a lot of cases it just makes my sentences more wordy. But I actually didn't know that the proper way to make a dash is to use two hyphens. I had just been using one hyphen and thinking it was the same. And although I am not analyzing poetry here obviously, I didn't know that if you take out a whole line you do a line of ellipses. That's interesting. But for the most part, I have a good understanding of ellipses. For example:

"Hu strengthens her claims with Sapolsky’s own words: 'People just don’t want to hear anything negative… You want to believe this fairy tale; it’s magical' (Hu 4)."

In this quote I used ellipses to show that there was material I had cut out. I think ellipses are actually super useful in that they help get the unneeded material out of there. This helps decrease wordiness and keep your reader engaged so they aren't bored with words unnecessary to your argument.