语言教学 | 普渡大学写作教学系列ESL 24-ESL Students 17
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Quotation marks (") are often used to indicate something said or written by another person, particularly if it is included inside your own original writing. If the quotation is embedded inside one of your own sentences, use commas, as shown in the following.
After getting off the ladder, Neil Armstrong intended to say, “That’s one small step for a man,” but he actually said, “That’s one small step for man.”
The professor asked the history students a question. “Now, can someone tell me why, in 1975, we pulled our troops out of Vietnam?”
Quotation marks are also used for language used to describe something or someone, but which is not being used by most people. Some examples include nicknames, labels for things that people do not wish to talk about in detail, or new things that have not been named or identified yet:
Alex “Frequent Flier” Hernandez is on his tenth business trip of the year!
Do not tell anyone about our “project.”
The Phoenix Lander on Mars uncovered “white stuff” beneath the red soil.
As you can see in the examples above, when a comma or period comes at the end of a pair of quotation marks, it goes inside the marks, not outside. However, if you are using quotation marks for a special word or phrase (not quoting someone’s writing or speech), you can put question marks and exclamation marks outside the quotation:
What did he mean by “double-down”?
Apostrophes (') are used less frequently in American English writing. They are used with an s to indicate possession by one person or thing ('s) or two or more persons or things (s'):
Victor’s staff has been putting in too much overtime.
Teachers’ pay has been rising faster than salaries in other sectors of the economy.
They are also a necessary part of contractions, in which words are combined or shortened:
Don’t [do not] talk about the content of the take-home test with your classmates.
A number of other punctuation marks are used less frequently, but still play important roles in English writing. Semicolons (;) are used to combine sentences into larger ones. Unlike the use of commas to combine very short sentences, semicolons are used for combining relatively longer sentences.
Semicolons are often used for combining sentences that are very closely related:
The rising costs of medicines and medical equipment are large factors in making health insurance more expensive; employers cannot afford those costs, and they have to pass them on to employees.
Colons (:) are used at the beginning of lists of several or more items, or as a substitute for “it is, “they are,” or similar expressions:
These are the major steps in applying for college: finding schools that have the major you want to study, filling out applications, asking for letters of recommendation, taking the SAT or ACT, and ordering official transcripts from your previous schools.
There is only one thing to do: talk to your daughter’s teacher about it.
Parentheses () are used to say something that is important to the main message you are writing but is not an immediate part of it, something that would interrupt the flow of your writing if you didn’t keep it separate from everything else:
Sang-hoon finished typing the report and saved multiple copies of it two hours after his supervisor gave the information to him (he types 85 words per minute).
The overnight managers (Connie on weekdays, John on weekends) will prepare bakery goods, coffee, and tea before the morning shift arrives.
（5）Hyphens and Dashes
Hyphens (-) are used to connect two or more words (and numbers) into a single concept, especially for building adjectives. Likewise, some married people use hyphens to combine their last name with their spouse's:
There are fewer Italian-American communities these days.
The family’s money-saving measures have been helping them to build their savings.
She has stopped buying 2-liter bottles and has started buying 0.5-liter bottles, instead.
I had a conversation with Mrs. Skinner-Kcrycek this morning.
They are also a necessary component of the numbers 21 through 99:
Before the exam, Tomas studied for thirty-three hours without sleep.
Although they can be used as substitutes for the word “to” when discussing value ranges and scores in games, it is better to use the word in formal writing situations than the punctuation:
The high temperature will be 87-89 degrees.
Hyphens are also used in syllable breaks when words cannot fit completely on a line, and must be continued on the following line. With word processors and the ability to automatically move whole words, though, this has become less common:
This opinion is based on sales figures for the past few months, and con-
versations I have had with customers.
Dashes (—) can be used to indicate an interruption, particularly in transcribed speech:
The chemistry student began to say, “An organic solvent will only work with—” when her cell phone rang.
They can also be used as a substitute for “it is, “they are,” or similar expressions. In this way they function like colons, but are not used for lists of multiple items, and are used less frequently in formal writing situations:
There was only one person suited to the job—Mr. Lee.
They can also be used as substitutes for parentheses:
Mr. Lee is suited to the job—he has more experience than everybody else in the department—but he has been having some difficulties at home recently, and would probably not be available.
Note that dashes are double the length of hyphens. When you type two hyphens together (--), most word processors automatically combine them into a single dash.
The Purdue OWL maintains a number of resources on punctuation you can visit to learn more:
Apostrophes
Commas
Conquering the Comma
Grammar and ESL Exercises
Hyphens
Punctuation Overview
Quotation Marks
Sentence Fragments
Sentence Punctuation Patterns