Courses

Communications

Punctuation Skills

Course Code: 01-03-EW67
Punctuation drives meaning in our documents; and questions about proper use of punctuation marks often come up at work. What rules on usage still apply for today’s business and technical writer? What changes have occurred—driven by the law and society? This course will cover the punctuation marks we use in our documents and will introduce the many changes from recent years. Topics covered in this course include understanding how to use punctuation marks correctly, recognizing how punctuation sets the tone in your documents, and how using the appropriate punctuation adds clarity to your message.

    Performance Objectives: Upon completion of this course you should be able to:

    • Know how and when to use end marks: periods, question marks, and exclamation points.
    • Know how and when to use punctuation with contractions, abbreviations, numbers, and symbols.
    • Know how and when to use pause marks: commas, semicolons, and colons.
    • Know how and when to use paired team marks: dashes, parentheses, brackets, and double and single quotation marks.
    • Know how and when to use these marks: hyphens, apostrophes, ellipses, slashes, asterisks, italics, and underlining.

    Competencies covered in this class: Written Communication

      Intended Audience:Public sector employees who write documents or edit the writing of others.