Although the name “quotation marks” derives from their use to mark words a writer is quoting from another person, they are also called speech marks or inverted commas and are used for words that are spoken…

The : mark was one of the very early punctuation devices in English but was not used then for its modern functions. The word colon was introduced in 1589. The ; mark arrived as a printers' invention soon after…

The comma has been with us for nearly 500 years as a punctuation mark, but in that time its use has changed. The original use remains, to indicate parts of a sentence, but…

It’s only a dot, but what a dot! The full stop has different names for its regional areas of use in English – full stop and period. It is also called a point or decimal point, full point and dot…

It was not until the mid-late 1700s that punctuation reached a level of sophistication that was close to today’s usage. Punctuation was made more consistent by printers and grammarians. The digital age further influenced…

Ideas in texts are developed through logical linkages among words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Without conjunctions and connectives, complex relationships among ideas…

Prepositions, as a word class, are relatively simple words. The most common prepositions are single words (at, in, on, to); modern grammars also recognise…

When adjectives and adverbs were invented deep in the origins of language, it must have been like the introduction of sound and colour to movies…

Verbs are ‘doing words’? Unfortunately this simplification fails to describe the verbal functions frequently used by literary heroes of the English language. Where is the ‘doing’ in “To be, or not to be: that is the question”…

Naming is possibly the most fundamental function of language. Modern humans have demonstrated a talent for inventing words to name anything – objects, places and ideas…