The act or art of punctuating or pointing a writing or discourse; the art or mode of dividing literary composition into sentences, and members of a sentence, by means of points, so as to elucidate the author's meaning.
helps a reader make sense of what you write; punctuation devices include periods, question marks, exclamation points, commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, parentheses, and brackets.
a conventional system of signs used to indicate stops or divisions in a sentence and to make meaning clearer: e.g., comma, period, semicolon, etc.
'the rules for graphically structuring written language by means of a set of conventional marks' (Coulmas, 1996, 421).
something that makes repeated and regular interruptions or divisions
the marks used to clarify meaning by indicating separation of words into sentences and clauses and phrases
the use of certain marks to clarify meaning of written material by grouping words grammatically into sentences and clauses and phrases
a system of marks used to introduce pauses and interruption into writing
a system of marking written text to illustrate pauses or logical relationships e.g. brackets; comma; colon; dashes; inverted commas; semi-colon.
Punctuation is the act and the effect of punctuating, i.e., using punctuation marks.Also with reference to a given writing: a bad, good punctuation; to revise, to fix the punctuation.
When annotating chess-games, commentators frequently use question marks and exclamation points to denote a move as bad or good. The symbols normally used are "??", "?", "?!", "!?", "!", and "!!". The corresponding symbol is juxtaposed in the text immediately after the move (e.g.