New answers tagged punctuation
1
Interesting question, but the sentence sounds odd. As soon as I read your question, the concept of Relative Clauses tugged upon my mind. Upon further searching, I found out that your sentence can be better presented with a co-ordinating conjunction. In this case, it might be better off as:
I don't have access to the internet right now, so could you handle ...
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Consider the pronunciation of "three fifty". Is there more stress on the "three" or on the "fifty"? If so, you're dealing with a word compound, and there can be a hyphen. If not, "three fifty" is a phrase not a word, so stress should come at the end.
"Fifty" has more stress than "three", so no hyphen.
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In US English and British English, "three fifty" would not indicate the number 350 without significant context contributing to that interpretation. It would indicate the number 3.50, typically in terms of money ($3.50 or £3.50). And in these contexts, it would not be hyphenated.
Both the example given in the question and the examples of money are themselves ...
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Titles like this are appositives: a construction where one noun phrase identifies an adjacent. Your question on comma use is almost a duplicate of this one, but a little broader, so I'll try to answer it in full. I'll quote the same style guideline as the top answer there:
Commas are used to set off an appositive when the appositive can only refer to a ...
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Context and authorial tone is important here. Your sentence is not a sentence yet--there's no main clause or verb that holds it all together. Grammar. However, your sentence is poetic and sounds good.
If you're writing poetry, you're fine. Go with colon, it's fine too--colons have lots of strict definitions, and less strict common usage.
If you are writing ...
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There is considerable leeway given to titles, as evidenced by terms such as headlinese. Quite separately, however, “why green” can be parsed as a question, or alternatively, as the introduction to an answer.
As a question, it can be thought of as an ellipsed form of “Why is it green?”
As a non-question, it can be thought of as an ellipsed form of “This is ...
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These appear interchangeable to me:
No. They are not interchangeable. The question mark is necessary. In "Why Green?" a question is being asked.
"Why green" is a shortened form of "Why is [insert subject] green?" , and the question mark is necessary.
Punctuation marks are essential in order to convey the intonation in the voice (and pauses in the speech) ...
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When to drop it
Dropping a question mark is not something you can do with all questions, some might sound weird. So why can we say "Why drop it: because it's a political issue." but we can't say ""When drop it: when you feel uncomfortable".
In order to drop a question mark, we need to use 2 language tools that separately are evidently useful and accepted.
...
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The comma is correct. It signals a parenthetical (nonessential or nonrestrictive) element.
That means you can leave off either positive or negative without affecting the meaning of the sentence; while the phrase drives home the point, it doesn't need to be there:
Finally, the populations of Russia and Turkey did not show any alterations.
These ...
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I think it is correct to put a comma there. The comma separates Finally, the populations of Russia and Turkey did not show any alterations, which is the main clause, from either positive or negative, which is a non-defining relative clause (which adds extra information but can be removed without losing the meaning of the sentence).
Quoting from https://www....
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There can be no comma - a questionmark is required.
"... he would watch the planes fly past and thought, "Why can't I travel too**?**" but he couldn't afford it[no comma] after all,
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The sentence does have problems but I am not sure that "additionally" is the significant one. In your sentence, "additionally" is a free modifier that fronts the clause, "conducted a lot of well-organized sports clubs." As, for example, in "Unfortunately, you have lost."
Fronting free modifiers are usually offset with a comma or commas.
In short, I would ...
1
If you are treating your email signature as something that will more-or-less be fully or partially cut/pasted for your surface-mail address, you should format your address in the signature the way your national postal authority recommends. As you have used an address in the United Kingdom as an example, I conclude that you are in the UK, and thus that the ...
1
I'll discuss the arguments in favor of adjectival analysis that Greg Lee offered in the post above.
PPs come after the noun they modify, not before.
Not only PPs but any possible form can be made a noun premodifier with the help of punctuation. I'll repeat that it is not only wrong to classify "off the cuff" as an adjective, even worse, it obscures ...
-1
I agree that "off the cuff" is a word, and an adjective. PPs come after the noun they modify, not before. Also, if it were a PP, the object "the cuff" could be pronominalized, but *"I noticed my cuff was dirty, so I made an off it remark.", and like other adjectives, it can be modified by an adverb: "He made a very off-the-cuff remark."
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"Off the cuff" cannot be thought of as a word in any grammatical context. As a syntactic constituent, this sequence of words is a prepositional phrase. As a PP it can be used as an attributive noun modifier, predicative complement or a manner adjunct.
He apologized for his off-the-cuff remark.
His remark was off the cuff.
The question cannot ...
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FWIW, I ended up here after viewing a half dozen other sites - results of a google search on this topic (one was EduBirdie Writing platform). They virtually all agreed that a comma should be used if the day is included (February 3, 2020) but not if only month and year are used (February 2020). I don't recall any of them mentioning using a comma after the ...
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This currently seems to be in flux. In the bad old days it was determined by the layout people. A period outside of a set of quotes all by itself offended their tidy nature. Periods, exclamation marks, question marks always went inside quotes and, I think, parentheses.
More recently the trend is to put the period with the most recent full sentence.
The ...
1
TL;DR
My short answer? Punctuate your sentence in one of the following two ways:
"The contents of your bag will include cheese, crackers and, optionally, vegetable stock."
"The contents of your bag will include cheese, crackers and (optionally) vegetable stock."
THE LONG & BORING ANSWER
To be really boring, your question raises two technical ...
2
The last explanation here is the most to the point: go by a manual of style. However, the example is an incorrect rendering of the Chicago manual. First, the answer to your question is "no"--with the exception of the hyphen (as you see here, a quotation mark followed by a hyphen). Second, since the sentence which has the questions within it is not a question,...
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Yeah, a four dot ellipsis is mostly used to indicate omitted text in a quotation after a sentence ends, but can also be used to convey pauses, silences, leading statements & unfinished thoughts that occur after a sentence ends. To use your example:
Alf: "Are you sure Mary isn't the park poo-jogger?"
Bazza: "Well, today, Mary went to the park...."
Alf: "...
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Usually I would use a comma, if the 'Of course' was introducing a contrary or alternative notion.
"The president is responsible for the actions of the Executive department, of course, our present president is an idiot."
Another way to look at it is to read it out loud. If you stop and pause after the '..course' then drop a comma.
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Of course not.
Am I going to explain? Of course I am.
"Of course" has many uses. Sometimes it is used in a similar way to the word "obviously". It is in this context that it should be followed by a comma.
Of course, I will explain further.
Obviously, I will explain further.
In other contexts, "of course" is added for emphasis, in the way the word "...
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