Punctuation in academic writing: Common pitfalls

Punctuation signals the structure of a text, telling us not only where one idea ends and another begins, but also which idea is more important and how it relates to other ideas. The wrong punctuation, then, signals the wrong relationship between ideas, confusing your reader.

These pages outline some of the most important punctuation rules and common mistakes. Punctuation misuse often causes or is caused by other kinds of mistakes, usually on the level of sentence structure.

• Commas (,)
• Quotation marks (“”)
• Apostrophes (‘)
• Semicolons (;)
• Colons (:)
• Dashes (– and —)
• Parentheses ( )
• Question marks (?)