¶ The Library
Punctuation
The young-learner edition — same rules, smaller steps, friendlier examples.
Young LearnersUK & US
In this pillar
Every young-learner article- Apostrophes — Contractions & Misuse That café sign selling 'apple's' and 'coffee's' — the plural apostrophe that never should exist
- Commas after Introductory Elements That little pause after your opening line — comma or not, and why it changes the meaning
- Commas around Non-Restrictive Elements A comma circled in red, "extra commas needed!" scrawled beside it — the non-restrictive rule, made simple
- Commas in Lists & the Oxford Comma Bread, milk and eggs — but does that last comma before "and" actually matter
- Dashes (En & Em) That aside you tack onto an email at 4:55 on a Friday — en dash or em, sorted
- End Punctuation (Full Stop/Period, ? and !) One tiny mark decides whether your sentence sounds finished, curious or completely unhinged
- Hyphens & Compound Adjectives You write 'ten year old boy' and pause — is that hyphenated, and where exactly do they go
- Parentheses & Brackets Finishing an email at ten to five, you wonder where the full stop lands with brackets
- Quotation Marks — UK vs US Compared On the copy desk, halfway through a piece — which side of the Atlantic are your quotes on
- Quotation Marks (UK English) A schoolgirl's dragon story stalls at one line: where do the speech marks actually go
- Quotation Marks (US English) Mid-sentence in a Slack message, you freeze — does the full stop go inside the quote marks
- Semicolons & Colons One sentence ends, another begins right after it — semicolon, colon or full stop, sorted
- The FANBOYS Comma & Comma Splices Two good sentences collide with just a comma between them — the classic splice, sorted for good