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The 7th Edition, published in 2007, stipulates that the use of periods, question marks, and exclamation points as "terminal punctuation" to end a sentence should be followed by a single space. [ 28 ] Until the early 2000s, the Modern Language Association (MLA) left room for its adherents to single or double sentence space.
The comma-free approach is often used with partial quotations: The report observed "a 45% reduction in transmission rate". A comma is required when it would be present in the same construction if none of the material were a quotation: In Margaret Mead's view, "we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities" to enrich our culture.
Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. [1] English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; [2] and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. [3]
Commas are placed between items in lists, as in They own a cat, a dog, two rabbits, and seven mice. Whether the final conjunction, most frequently and, should be preceded by a comma, called the serial comma, is one of the most disputed linguistic or stylistic questions in English: They served apples, peaches, and bananas. (serial comma used)
[8] [1] The word period was used as a name for what printers often called the "full point", the punctuation mark that was a dot on the baseline and used in several situations. The phrase full stop was only used to refer to the punctuation mark when it was used to terminate a sentence. [1] This terminological distinction seems to be eroding.
In general, digits should be grouped and separated either by commas or by narrow gaps (never a period/full point). Grouping with commas Left of the decimal point, five or more digits are grouped into threes separated by commas (e.g. 12,200; 255,200 km; 8,274,527th; 1 ⁄ 86,400).
The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within a sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but ...
This is a comma before "and" or "or" at the end of a series, regardless of whether it is needed for clarification purposes. For example: X, Y, and Z (with an Oxford comma) X, Y and Z (without an Oxford comma) Wikipedia has no preference between the two styles, but requests that the chosen style be used consistently within an article.