Punctuation, 2

In this blog I will be addressing my own common punctuation mistakes colon, apostrophes, and quotation marks.

stevepb "mistake" accessed via Pixabay
Uploaded September 2015 CC0 Public Domain

Colon:
The only cases in which you use a colon are including a list after an independent clause, an appositive, a quotation, or a summary or explanation.  I've found the semicolon to appear much more often in my writing.  Used selectively, it can be an easy way to draw attention to specific words.  Often I avoid using them, because I find fragments the sentence.  Using too many colons dims their effectiveness.

Apostrophes:
Apostrophe mistakes do appear in my writing, but not as often as extra commas.  My most common mistake is using it when the nouns are not possessive and in possessive pronouns.  Apostrophes are a grammatical mistake that will often happen when writing quickly through a draft, and luckily are pretty easy to find and fix.

Quotation Marks:
One mistake I was unaware of was placing the both commas and periods inside of the quotation marks.  I thought the procedure for periods was to leave them out of the quotation and place them at the end of the sentence in any situation.  I will be changing my essay accordingly.

REFLECTION:

I had already gone through and fixed a lot of these mistakes in the first round of revisions, as spell check initially picks up a majority of these mistakes.  One of the notable apostrophes was in the first sentence of the first draft.

"Pope Francis the “super-pope”  has flipped the world on it’s head."
Which changed to "Pope Francis the “super-pope”  has flipped the world on its head."

The quotations I did have to go back and change the placement of the period from:

"He starts the article already with witty analysis of the Heartland Institute, “Their stated goal for the visit - in their own words, including exclamatory punctuation - has been ‘to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global-warming crisis!’”  The timing of their trip, like that of the desperate-seeming exclamation point, is telling”."

This changed to the period location being within the quotations:

"He starts the article already with witty analysis of the Heartland Institute, “Their stated goal for the visit - in their own words, including exclamatory punctuation - has been ‘to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global-warming crisis!’”  The timing of their trip, like that of the desperate-seeming exclamation point, is telling.'"