Category Archives: Reading

 How to Punctuate Quotes

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In a previous article, we covered when to use quotation marks. Now let’s learn how to punctuation them.

BEFORE THE QUOTE

Commas and colons are the only punctuation marks used before a quote. Using these two is straightforward and uncomplicated, and you may already have an intuitive sense of how to use them from your readings. (Sidenote: in your journey through older texts, you many find that some authors place a dash before a quotation. This use is now antiquated and should be avoided.)

 

Commas

Use the comma before a citation or direct speech. The comma introduces the quote, and allows the reader to pause momentarily before continuing. Nearly all quotations of direct speech will begin with a comma. Often the comma will come after phrases like ‘she said’ or ‘she asked.’

She turned toward the sun and asked, “When will a day truly be mine?”

Don’t use a comma, or any punctuation, if you lead into the quote with the word ‘that.’

Mark Twain said that “The coldest winter [he] ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

And in some cases, you won’t even use quotation marks as shown in the example bellow.

I overheard her say that she wants the day to be hers. What does that mean?

 

Colons

In three situations, colons are more appropriate for introducing quotes:

(1) If you write a complete thought, and the quote that follows illustrates what you wrote, use a colon. This is most common with citations, but not exclusively so.

President Obama’s positive attitude is clear in his campaign slogan: “Yes we can!”

 

(2) When the quote is long—longer than a single sentence or longer than two short sentences—use a colon. Again this is more common with citations.

John Cleese wrote a clever piece of satire about European nations and their threat levelst. Perhaps stereotypical and a slight offensive, but this is the fault of most great comedy: “The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from ‘Run’ to ‘Hide.’ The only two higher levels in France are ‘Collaborate’ and ‘Surrender.’ The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.”

 

(3) Use a colon with block quotations—hefty, long quotes indented and separate from the rest of the paragraph. Blockquotes don’t actually have quotation marks since indenting and quotation marks indicate the same thing—a direct, word‐for‐word citation. But in the example below, due to formating limitations, I have left the quotation marks.

Milan Kundera begins his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, unlike other novels. He begins with philosophy:

“The idea of the eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we have experienced it, and the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”

 

Proficient writers can drop punctuation altogether at the beginning of quotes by crafting a sentence whose syntax matches that of the quote. This is especially true when citing only a phrase or clause.

Kundera’s book is about just that, about the “shadows, without weight, dead in advance.” Or to put it negatively, a life full of weight is more meaningful and desirable.

 

BREAKING A QUOTE IN THE MIDDLE

When a quotation is interrupted before completion, a comma will signal the beginning of the break and the end of the break. The first comma is placed inside of the closing punctuation mark; the last comma will proceed the initial quotation mark of the rest of the quote. Seeing an example will make this clear.

“Margaret, why is it,” asked James sternly, “that every time I leave the room, you eat all of my ice cream? I fill the bowl back up and you just eat it. Why?”

This is the primary way to break a quote into two parts. No other punctuation marks are used.

 

END OF THE QUOTE

Periods & Commas

From the previous examples, you are able to see some of the typical ways to punctuate the end of a quotation: punctuation mark first, then the end punctuation mark.

Yet some differences in end punctuation do arise depending on your geography.

If you write for an American audience, always place a period or comma inside the final quotation mark, regardless of the original quote. The following quote comes from Plato’s Apology. This is Socrates speaking to the court which just condemned him to death:

AMERICAN AUDIENCE: “You are wrong if you believe by killing people you will prevent anyone from reproaching you for not living in the right way.”

AMERICAN AUDIENCE: Perhaps we need to define “living the right way.”

If you write for a British audience, placement of the end punctuation mark depends on the original quote. So, if the original quote did not have the punctuation, you need to keep the punctuation out of the quote. Although some exceptions do apply (as if this isn’t confusing enough), like in fiction, the punctuation marks can live inside of the quotation mark.

BRITISH AUDIENCE: Perhaps we need to define “living the right way”.

 

Colons & Semicolons

Americans and Britons agree–keep them outside of the last quotation mark. Unless, of course, it is part of the original quotation. Let’s look at a quote from the Rig-Veda X, a creation story:

“When neither Being nor Not-Being was”: in the Christian tradition, this same idea reads differently but is uncanny in its similarity.

“What did it encompass? Where? In whose protection?”; these questions, though, are not found in the Christian Bible.

 

Exclamation & Question Marks

If the original text contained an exclamation or question mark, keep the end mark inside of the end quotation.

ORIGINAL TEXT: What did it encompass? Where? In whose protection?

CITATION: “What did it encompass? Where? In whose protection?”

But if the text did not contain an exclamation or question mark, and it is your addition, place the end marks outside of the end quotation.

ORIGINAL TEXT: Wise seers, searching within their hearts.

CITATION: But what does this line mean: “Wiser seers, searching within their hearts”?

 

 Comma Usage: Connector and Separator

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Daniel Schwen, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), via Wikimedia Commons

“A comma is just a coupler.”

“What’s that? A thing that makes couples?”

“I suppose so.”

Technically speaking, a coupler is the mechanism in the image above that connects one train car to the next. It also separates the train cars enough to keep them from knocking into each other. So, in a way, a coupler is something that makes couples. Another type of coupler is a comma (they almost look the same too). Commas can play the same role in a sentence–connecting or separating.

Issue

Within English, the comma has many roles and many uses, which can cause students trouble. Commas appear in writing a lot–almost as pervasive as the period–and since students see a lot of commas in writing, they tend to use the comma haphazardly whenever they are unsure what to do. If they feel like they need punctuation, but aren’t sure what kind, they use a comma. If students feel like they need to elevate their writing, but aren’t sure how, they use commas. This can be corrected, though.

Background

The word “comma”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the the Greek “komma” (κόμμα), which means “something cut off” or “a short clause”. The definition and origin of the word comma does hint at its purpose. But ultimately, as with any punctuation, a comma is a mark used to increase readability; a way to tell your reader how to read what you wrote–specifically, when to pause.

Rules

The comma is used in numerous situations in a sentence. Some of these situations require a comma and some of these situations depend on the choice of the writer. In this post, I want to focus on a the comma as a connector and separator. You’ll find that these are instances that require a comma, so no authorial choice here.

 

Comma + Coordinating Conjunction

A comma must accompany a coordinating conjunction when linking independent clauses. Instead of using a semicolon or a period to create a sentence that contains two subjects and two predicates, writers use words, like “and” or “but”, to join ideas and show their relationship.

So anytime that you find a sentence linked to another sentence with a coordinating conjunction (and, or, for, nor, but, yet, so), you must use a comma.

Ice cream is delicious, and I smile when I eat it.

The state fair begins tomorrow, but I think that I will go on the weekend.

 

Comma in a series or list

Another very common way to use a comma is to separate items in a series or list.  The comma perfectly signals to the reader where one item ends and another begins.

The best ice cream flavors are rocky road, coconut, and dulce de leche.

Can you pick up eggs, a blue ball, nine apples, a piano seat, and eye glasses at the store when you go?

Debates rage over whether to put a comma before the coordinating conjunction in a list. That is the comma after coconut and seat in the examples above. I intend to write an entire article tackling this issue. For now, continue to do what you do, and if you don’t have something that you regularly do, start including the comma after the conjunction.

 

Comma with equal adjectives

Just like in a list of items, a comma should also be used when you have a list of equal adjectives. Equal adjectives are generally less common than other adjectives, like colors, numbers, and shapes, and each adjective equally and individually modifies the noun. However, with the more common adjectives, which tend to stack on top of each other, each one describes the next in turn, until arriving at the noun.

The deft, nimble, aged hands of the carpenter quickly whittled a small doll for the young girl.

In the sentence above, the words deft, nimble and aged each describe hands. The best way to know if you are using equal adjectives is to reorder the adjectives (“aged, deft, nimble hands”). If your phrase still makes sense, then use commas. Another test is to read your phrase with “and” inserted between the adjectives (“deft and nimble and aged hands”). If it makes senses, then they are equal adjectives. If it sounds strange, they are not equal, and you will not use a comma. For example:

I ate three red apples.

In the sentence above, if you reorder the adjectives three and red, the sentence will sound very strange (“red three apples”). Also, if you place the word “and” between them (“three and red apples), the sentence will sound strange. Thus these adjectives should not be separated by a comma.

The rules governing comma usage are extensive. We have only touched on three so far. Next week, another article on commas will look at some of the other comma rules.

 

The series on commas continues: “Comma Usage: For Spicing It Up.”

 Sentence Fragments

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By Naval History & Heritage Command from Washington, DC, USA CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Can you identify the object in the picture? Sure, it’s broken glass, but where is the glass from? How did it become this way? What was its original purpose? Since these are only fragments of what use to be, we can’t determine what the object was or how it was made or even how big the object was. This is the character fragments: they are incomplete, lack information, and require more explanation for them to be understandable. Sentence fragments and glass fragments share this characteristic. A major difference, though, is that sentence fragments are poseurs. A shard of glass can’t pretend to be a window or a vase, but a sentence fragment does attempt to fool us with the superficial characteristics of a sentence.

In this article, I will first review the basics of a sentence, so you can avoid writing fragments. The article concludes with common fragments and ways to correct fragments. In this way, you can identify flaws and revise them.

What is a Sentence?

Simply, a sentence is a subject and a verb–I live. But the story is a little more complex. A sentence is really a proposition, that is, it is a statement or question, a command or an exclamation. As part of the agreement between people talking, the speaker must identify a subject and what happens to that subject or what that subject does. In some languages, the speaker can establish the topic and then talk about it endlessly without having to mention the subject by name again. A speaker of Japanese can say, “Tokyo is its own thing. Unique from the rest of the country. Unique on this planet. Massive buildings with fast trains, clean streets. More lights than you can image. Delicious food is the best part.”

But English does not afford us such luxuries. Every sentence needs a subject, a verb, and must express a logically complete thought. To better understand a sentence, let’s look at a smaller grammatical unit–the phrase–and then proceed to the larger grammatical unit–the clause.
Phrase
A phrase is collection of words in a sentence that acts like an adjective, an adverb, or a noun. Phrases are the Swiss army knife of grammar–acting as subject, filling the role of object, describing, introducing, and modifying. Speakers and writers combine and connect phrases to form sentences.

Clause
A clause is collection of words that always contains a noun and a verb. Here we have the makings of a sentence. But wait. Remember a sentence must also express a complete logical idea. As such, some clauses in English are sentences and some are not. One clause expresses a complete thought and the other does not. Now, if I told you that one clause is called “independent” and the other “dependent,” or even rudely, “subordinate,” could you guess which one is the complete, logical thought? “Independent is the correct answer, please come down and accept your prize.”

 

Five Common Phrase Errors

Sentence fragments are posers! They look like a sentence with a nice capitalized letter at the beginning and even a period at the end. But we just learned that this is not the definition of a sentence. A subject, predicate, and complete thought.

Now there is an exception, a time when a writer can violate this rule. Like I just did. But I had a reason. I wanted to introduce this exception with an example, and also, it adds more rhetorical weight to what I was writing. The choice to fragment a sentence must be planned and plotted, and you can’t plan and plot unless you deeply understand the rules of grammar.

In the section below, fragments are underlined. The corrections to the fragments can be found further down the page.

1. descriptive introductions

FRAGMENT: At dawn on rolling hills of Pacific waters, looking into an inky darkness below a sky breaking into a stain glass, chilled but invigorated.

2. prepositional phrases

FRAGMENT: I put the turkey in the freezer with the goats and sheep. Near the caterpillar legs and ostrich ankles.

3. compound predicates

FRAGMENT: Salmon spend their life at sea. But return to their birthplace in fresh water to die.

4. examples

FRAGMENT: There are plenty of places to visit in California. For example, Yosemite National Park and San Francisco.

5. lists

FRAGMENT: Our time machine is composed of discrete, interconnected modules, yet, to realize are dream, we direly need the following items package discreetly. Four dozen chocolate chip cookies, 32 white screws, at least two rolls of tape, and probably two of your major credit cards.

Dependent Clause Errors

FRAGMENT: The most obvious solutions tend to be the hardest to implement. Since people tend to think a complex problems require complex solutions.

 

Ways to Correct

Phrases:
1. Attach phrase to a nearby sentence.
Sometimes you will need to use a comma, colon, or dash to connect the phrase to a sentence.

I put the turkey in the freezer with the goats and sheep near the caterpillar legs and ostrich ankles.

There are plenty of places to visit in California, for example, Yosemite National Park and San Francisco.

Our time machine is composed of discrete, interconnected modules, yet, to realize are dream, we direly need the following items package discreetly: four dozen chocolate chip cookies, 32 white screws, at least two rolls of tape, and probably two of your major credit cards.

2. Make a complete sentence by adding a subject or a predicate.

Salmon spend their life at sea. But they return to their birthplace in fresh water to die.

I waited at dawn on rolling hills of Pacific waters, looking into an inky darkness below a sky breaking into a stain glass, chilled but invigorated.

 

Clauses:
1. Attach clause to a nearby sentence. This is the most common solution–usually the easiest way to solve problem.

The most obvious solutions tend to be the hardest to implement since people tend to think a complex problems require complex solutions.

2. Remove the transition word.

The most obvious solutions tend to be the hardest to implement. People tend to think a complex problems require complex solutions.

 Best Online Resources for Learning Vocabulary

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The time has come to expand your vocabulary–a tortuous yet joyous endeavor full of set backs and just rewards, which will expand your consciousness and add precision to your thoughts and speech, like transitioning from finger painting to 3D printed sculptures. Your mental and spoken universe will expand in a multitude of directions creating deep webs of categories, imbued with your personal experience.

Like most students, you need to spend time learning new words and reading new material to prepare for the Test. One thing must be clear from the beginning, though, this task requires time and diligence. Learning new words should not only be something you do on flashcards during “study time,” but also a regular part of life, a habit like brushing your teeth or washing your clothes. We are blessed to have the ability to Know in seconds. Take advantage of those blessings and look up the unknown word.

What follows is a selection of the best online resources for learning, researching, and expanding vocabulary. The first two are resources for looking up words, and the rest are games, flashcards, and other online applications to learn new words.

Wordnik

Wordnik is a clean, simple, robust site that gives you a plethora of information about a word. The UI is clean. The breadth of resources and information is astonishing. The people at Wordnik put thought into improving the online dictionary.

Wordnik definition for "penumbra"

For each word you look up, Wordnik returns:

  1. definitions from multiple sources around the web,
  2. multiple examples of the word in passages,
  3. synonyms,
  4. antonyms,
  5. hypernyms (words that are more generic or abstract),
  6. hyponyms (words that are more specific),
  7. words found in similar contexts,
  8. other words that contain the word in their definition,
  9. pictures that contain the word in their description,
  10. a word map: a visual representation of synonyms, similar words, antonyms, word forms, and rhymes (great resource for us visual, spacial learners),
  11. pronunciation sound files,
  12. and even the word’s scrabble score.

Also, users can create lists of words, which can be useful if you are unsure what words to study. Here is an SAT word list and a GRE word list.

 Google Definitions

I wonder sometimes if there is anything that Google can’t do–a searchable index of the largest collection of information the world has ever known, glasses augmenting reality, open-source operating systems, indexing all printed texts, mapping the world, online documents, self-driving cars, cell phones, translation tablets–and now, definitions!

To look up the meaning of a word, merely type “define” before the word, and Google will return a small card with the word, pronunciation information, a sound file, and definitions. Click on the “More Info” link (follow the red arrow in the image above) for more definitions, example sentences, synonyms, antonyms, and images.

Freerice

Freerice has a special place in my heart. It has been around longer than any of these other resources, and as such, it is the one I have used the longest. The UI is not as up-to-date as some of the other sites, but this is the only site that has a mission beyond expanding your vocabulary. While you learn new words, Freerice makes a donation to the World Food Programme. So when you answer correctly, you have the double satisfaction of knowing a word and helping fight hunger.

I recommend signing up for Freerice so you can track your progress and save your vocabulary level since words you don’t know will cycle back through until you answer them correctly. Students preparing for the SAT should aim for levels 20 – 30, and students preparing for the GRE or GMAT should aim for level 40 and up.

Quizlet

Quizlet is definitely the new, cool kid in online vocab resources. There is a lot of intelligence built into this site allowing users a high level of customization. With a plethora of tools and lists (from worm vocabulary to monsters of Greek myth), this is a hard resource not to use. Below you can see all the user-created word lists for Standardized Tests.

The site is built around lists of flashcards created by users. Users can print out the words in multiple formats, including flashcards of varying sizes, embed the list somewhere else on the web, and the best part, play two fun vocabulary games based on the list. One game, Scatter, separates words and their definitions, and the player has to drag the word to the definition, or vice versa. The other game, Space Race, requires the player to type the word as the definition floats by on the screen. There is also functionality to learn spelling, an often neglected part of learning new words.

Vocabulary

 

Vocabulary is another hot, new resource. The UI is clean and new, and the site provides a similar functionality to Freerice, but with more functionality. Questions adapt to your level, formats change from “choose the closest synonym” to “determine a word’s meaning in a sentence.” When you answer incorrectly, you’ll be presented with a short definition and explanation of the word.