Gustavus Adolphus College

Use punctuation to clarify meaning: It helps sometimes to read a sentence aloud and punctuate the way you speak.

Avoid overuse of semi-colons, exclamation points, dashes, parenthetical expressions, and italic emphases. (We appear to have ignored that advice in this document!)

Quotation marks:

• Periods and commas always go within quotes according to American English convention; other punctuation goes within only if it is part of the quoted material.
• Generally, titles of short stories, poems, or articles; individual chapters in books; individual songs and other short musical compositions; and radio and television shows (or single episodes of a continuing series) are set off in quotes. Titles of books, paintings and sculptures, films, magazines, plays, record albums, operas and other long musical works, newspapers, and continuing television/radio series are italicized. Check the Chicago Manual of Style for a more complete listing.

• Follow Strunk and White’s second rule for serial commas: "In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last. Thus write, 'red, white, and blue.'"
• The final comma is frequently omitted from the names of business firms; follow the usage of the individual firm: "Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc."
• When a specific date is used with month and year, set the year off with commas; when a month and year appear alone, no comma is necessary: "June 6, 1944, was D-Day"; but, "D-Day preparations came to fruition in June 1944."
• A comma before the Jr. or Sr. in a proper name is not necessary: "Martin Luther King Jr."

• Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ’s: " Steve's pencil," "Marx's theories," "Gustavus's traditions" (but note also, "Gustavus traditions"). Generally, if you would pronounce the additional syllable in the possessive, write it as ���s; exceptions are too rare to take the space to explain them here.
• Plural possessives are formed by adding an apostrophe after the "s," unless the word has a special plural construction that does not end in "s": "students' rights"; but, "women's studies."
• Plurals of words should NOT contain apostrophes: Keep up with the "Joneses," not the "Jones's"; and, "thousands of items," not "thousand's." (One exception is plurals of single letters, which may require an apostrophe to avoid misinterpretation: "She earned all A's.")
• "It's" ALWAYS means "it is"; the pronoun possessive is "its"���with NO apostrophe: "The College celebrates its Swedish heritage." (After all, you wouldn���t think of putting an apostrophe in "his" . . .)
• Alumni are identified in college publications such as the Gustavus Quarterly by listing the last two digits of their graduation years (with apostrophe) following their names: e.g., "Randall Stuckey ’83." (Be careful when keyboarding—some word processing programs that have the so-called "smart quote" feature will turn the apostrophe around!)

• Compound adjectives are hyphenated, but don’t hyphenate "-ly" words (adverbs): "full-time job" and "well-known speaker"; but, "easily remembered rule."
• Prefixes such as "non," "un," "re," and "co" generally do not require hyphens; however, use a hyphen if the word that follows a prefix is capitalized: "non-Western."
• For some words, sense is the governing factor: "resign" (quit) vs. "re-sign" (sign again).
• Hyphenate "ex-" when it means "former" ("ex-convict") but not when it means "out of" ("exhale").
• When anything is defined by a century, decade, or year (i.e., when such a phrase is an adjective), use a hyphen between the number and the time period: "20th-century literature," "first-year student." An exception is the Alumni Office's "First Decade Awards."
• Use a hyphen for any prefixed words you can’t find in the dictionary, unless a hyphen would distort the sense of the word.
• Use the hyphen to avoid possible misinterpretation: A "fast sailing ship" may be interpreted as a speedy ship with sails or any ship that happens to be moving quickly—"fast-sailing ship" makes the latter clearer.
• Use the "em" dash (— ; those who remember typewriters learned it as two hyphens with no space on either side) to indicate an abrupt insertion or change of thought in a sentence. Use an "en" dash (–) to express intervals in numbers ("1939–1945" rather than "1939-1945"). (These dashes may be found among the special symbols of most word processing programs.)

• The hash marks that denote inches and feet (called "primes") are properly rendered as straight marks ( 6' 5" ) and are generally found among the special symbols of a printer’s typeface or word processing program. Avoid using the quotation mark key for this purpose since many typographic fonts and software programs, such as Word and WordPerfect, may display the curly "smart quotes."