Punctuation Rules at a Glance
Here's the thing — sometimes you don't want the whole lesson, you just want to check one mark and get back to your sentence. So here they are, side by side: the UK habit against the US habit. Where the two don't genuinely differ, I've said so rather than dress up a difference that isn't real — a blank is more honest than a made-up rule. Every row points home to P6 · Punctuation, where the actual teaching lives.
Each row is tagged rule (fixed, both sides agree), tendency (a strong preference, not a law) or variant (both forms genuinely in use).
| Mark | UK practice | US practice | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comma tendency P6 → |
Serial (Oxford) comma usually left out; add it only to stop a list going ambiguous. House styles vary — Oxford's own keeps it. | Serial comma used more consistently, especially in book and academic style. | UK: scones, jam and cream US: scones, jam, and cream |
| Semicolon rule (shared) P6 → |
Links two related independent clauses; separates list items that already contain commas. | Same. | The train was late; nobody seemed surprised. |
| Colon tendency P6 → |
Introduces a list, an explanation or a quotation. A full sentence after the colon usually starts lower-case. | Same jobs; a full sentence after the colon is more often capitalised. | UK: One thing was clear: we were lost. US: One thing was clear: We were lost. |
| Dash tendency P6 → |
Spaced en dash for a parenthetical aside – like this – and for ranges (2010–2015). | Closed, unspaced em dash for the aside—like this—; en dash kept mainly for ranges. | UK: The plan – all of it – fell apart. US: The plan—all of it—fell apart. |
| Hyphen rule (shared) P6 → |
Joins compound modifiers before a noun and some prefixes; splits words at line breaks. Which particular compounds take a hyphen is a spelling matter → P8. | Same principles. | a well-known author; a two-thirds majority |
| Quotation marks tendency P6 → |
Single marks first (' '), double for a quote inside a quote. A comma or full stop sits outside the closing mark unless it belongs to the quoted words. | Double marks first (" "), single inside. Commas and full stops [US: periods] sit inside the closing mark. | UK: She called it 'a shambles'. US: She called it "a shambles." |
| Apostrophe rule (shared) P6 → · P2 → |
Marks possession (the editor's desk) and omission in contractions (don't); no apostrophe in ordinary plurals; its / it's unchanged. | Same. | the editor's desk; it's late; the 1990s |
| Parentheses / brackets variant (terminology) P6 → |
( ) are usually called round brackets, or just brackets; [ ] are square brackets. Use and terminal-punctuation logic are the same on both sides. | ( ) are parentheses; [ ] are brackets. Same use. | She arrived late (again). |
For the full teaching on any mark above, go home to P6 · Punctuation. For the wider picture of how the two Englishes differ, see the Master UK/US Index.