By Colons, Punctuation

Hi, If the list is longer, can you still use commas?Can you say this:Which do you like best, coffee, tea, orange juice or water? You can say it, but you have to use your judgement about when the list gets too long and awkward. Then you could use a colon, although you could also just express it...

It has to be "than", because the sentence is comparing the amount of supervision today with the amount of supervision 25 years ago.- to have less X than Y (Y here gives an alternative reference point to X)- to have less SUPERVISION than 25 YEARS AGO.-- than WHEN TRADITIONAL FAMILY STRUCTURES WERE...

I'm looking for software that checks punctuation. In the previous sentence, I didn't know if a semi-colon was called for, and I would like to have a tool that could answer all of my punctuation questions.

Tanit, I agree with the punctuation in all your examples. The semicolons are all required (or can be replaced by a full stop).BTW, what language/dialect is the quote at the bottom of your posts?

I sometimes use the word "clever" when describing a person.Here it is clear that the full stop has nothing to do with the quoted word and is part of the main sentence. The word "clever" doesn't need its own full stop. If we are quoting somebody speaking, then the quoted speech needs its own...

On the question of semi-colons, Clive will have noticed that my posts are full of them. This is partly because they are still in fashion in Italian and this probably influences me, although I did learn how to use them at school. It would be fine if in English we just substituted the semi-colon...

A boy met this girl. They both had a fascination with grammar. The girl's family did not approve - he was from the school that did not use the Oxford comma. But she insisted it did not matter. Until the day she saw him use his red pen on a semi-colon; this was her pet punctuation mark. She was...

In an essay, with only three items on the list, and all of them being quite short, I would just write them in the sentence. If the preceding part of the sentence is quite long, then use a colon. blah blah blah resulted in three areas being declared off-limits for development: x, y, and z. With...

Hi simplyblessedwithlove, You wrote: And I think the punctuation also counts. Even the advanced non-native English speakers sometimes punctuate their sentences wrong. I really wouldn't think so. Of course, non-native speakers make mistakes when punctuating sentences. However, far from all...

"Place commas and periods inside, not outside, quotation marks. Place all other punctuation outside quotation marks unless it was contained in the original source. Follow this practice whether or not the comma is part of the original quotation. The general rule is that commas and periods should...