LEC052039. SAIGA SUSAN THODATHIL ."MECHANICS OF WRITING"

 

The conventions that govern the technical aspects of writing are known as writing mechanics. It includes spelling, punctuation, capitalization and abbreviations. Spelling is the correct arrangement of letters that form words.

Punctuation helps readers to make sense of what is written. A period is used to end a declarative sentence whereas an interrogative sentence ends with a question mark. An exclamatory sentence is one that expresses a strong or forceful emotion, such as anger, surprise, or joy: it ends with an exclamation mark. A comma is used to separate ideas in a sentence. For instance, “The number of students were large, so they were divided into two groups. A colon introduces an element or series of elements that illustrates or amplifies the information that preceded the colon. When a colon appears in a sentence, it usually gives the silent impression of “as follows,” “which is/are,” or “thus.” For instance, “We have two options here: stay and fight, or run like the wind”. A semicolon is used to join two closely related independent clauses. A semicolon is not used together with a conjunction in a sentence. For instance, “Money is the root of all evil; I don’t believe the reverse is necessarily true”. An ellipsis looks like three periods in a row with spaces in between them. There are two main uses for ellipses. One is to show that you have left something out. For instance, “Hamlet asked whether it was “nobler . . . to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles”. In the sentence above, the words “in the mind” have been omitted from the quote. An ellipsis is also used to create a literary effect: to represent a dramatic pause or a thought that trails off. This usage is fine in fiction, but it is avoided in formal writing. A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In a contraction, an apostrophe represents missing letters. For instance, He would=He’d. An apostrophe is also used while forming possessives. For instance, “The writer’s pen”. Parentheses are punctuation marks that are used to set off information within a text or paragraph. They can enclose a single word, a phrase, or even an entire sentence. Typically, the words inside the parentheses provide extra information about something else in the sentence. For instance, “Curators from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) have announced a new dinosaur exhibit”. A hyphen (-) is a punctuation mark that’s used to join words or parts of words. It’s not interchangeable with other types of dashes. A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text (not at the bottom: that’s an underscore). It’s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause.  Dashes are used to separate groups of words, not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. For instance, “It’s recommended you don’t take down any load-bearing walls when renovating”. There are two types of slashes: a backslash (\) and a forward slash (/). The backslash is used only for computer coding. The forward slash, often simply referred to as a slash, is a punctuation mark used in English. The only time it is appropriate to use a comma after a slash is when demonstrating breaks between lines of poetry, songs, or plays.

The rules of English capitalization are: the first word of a sentence and proper nouns [such as names of cities, countries, companies, religions, and political parties etc.] are always capitalized. An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word. It makes easier to read long or cumbersome phrase in a sentence.

Proper knowledge of the mechanics of writing enables a person to write effectively.