Everybody's Writing-Desk Book Author:Charles Nisbet, Don Lemon, James Baldwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PUNCTUATION. Punctuation is a system of marks the purpose of which is to indicate to the eye the relation to one another in meaning:, and so the relative impo... more »rtance, of the component parts of a written composition. The Marks of Punctuation, corresponding, for the most part, to pauses in spoken language, are the comma (,), the period (. ), tlie note of interrogation ( ?), the note of exclamation ( !), the colon ( :); the semicolon ( ;), the dash (—), parentheses ( ), brackets [ ], quotation marks ( " " ), the hyphen (-), etc. Purpose of Punctuation.—Punctuation fully serves its purpose when it does all that is in the power of punctuation to facilitate the task of reading. Avoid all Unnecessary Marks.—A sentence consisting of a simple subject, a simple predicate, and a simple object, or the relation of whose parts is clearly intelligible without punctuation marks, should not be encumbered with any. " The harvest moon is shining in the night." " There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance." Comma. 1. Three or more words of the same part of speech not connected by conjunctions are often separated from one another by commas. "Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?" "He was active, persevering, ingenious." 2. Two words contrasted with one another are separated by a comma: " Though deep, yet clear." " He is slow, but sure." 8. Words in a series of pairs are parted, one pair from thenext, by a comma: "Young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor, fair and dark." 4. Words and phrases in apposition are generally separated thrf one Trom the oiher by a comma : "Rome, long the mistress of the world." " England, the greatest naval power." A comma should not, ho...« less