Punctuation: Grammar and Punctuation Mastery
What you'll learn
- Four fundamental rules of punctuation: terminate sentences with either a period or a question mark, use commas to add pauses and double quotes to enclose dialog
- The major exception to the four fundamental rules of punctuation; namely, terminating a sentence with an exclamation mark to make an emphatic statement.
- Use commas to separate and introduction from a sentence, to enclose parenthetical asides, to implement lists and to separate conclusions from the sentence.
- What is the Oxford comma and whether to include it or exclude it in your comma separated lists.
- The proper use of comma alternatives including semicolons, parentheses, colons, dashes and slashes.
- The proper use of less common punctuation including ellipses, braces and brackets.
- How to specifying possession and contraction using apostrophes.
- How to combine related words to form a compound word using hyphens.
- The rules for writing dialog using proper punctuation.
Requirements
- This course demonstrates punctuation using Microsoft Word 2016. Students will need access to a similar editor to follow along and complete assignments.
- This course demonstrates copy editing your own work using the free version of the Grammarly Word plugin. Students will need to download and install the Grammarly word plugin to follow along.
Description
Hello, and welcome to the best (well-paced, well-structured, well-presented and complete) English punctuation course on Udemy. This course is studded with workshops, quizzes and assignments that will ingrain proper punctuation directly into your fingers so you don't have to think about it while you're writing. Warning, this short course, though targeted at beginning writers, is a challenge to complete!
Knowledge of proper punctuation is essential to writing grammatically correct English prose and dialog.
So, everyone must know how to use proper punctuation, right? Wrong!
Unfortunately, existing training on English grammar and punctuation makes using proper punctuation complicated. Until now!
I'm here to tell you that learning proper English punctuation need not be complicated nor take a long time. In fact, I teach you how to write virtually anything using proper punctuation in the second four-minute lecture. Since the second lecture is free to preview, you should watch it to establish a sound foundation for your future writing. The remainder of the course expands upon the second lecture by extending and elaborating on the fundamental rules of punctuation and by providing plenty of detailed examples.
In this course, I explain everything you need to know about punctuation to be a great writer in just under two hours.
How do I accomplish this?
By focusing on the simplest and most common punctuation needs of most writers.
By deemphasizing the most uncommon forms of punctuation.
There are only 15 punctuation marks in the English language: period (.), question mark (?), exclamation mark (!), comma (,), double quotes (""), apostrophe ('), hyphen (-), parentheses (), semicolon (;), colon (:), dash (--), ellipsis (...), slash (/), braces({}) and brackets ([]).
In the first section of this course, I discuss how to write virtually anything using the first 5 punctuation marks. By the end of the course, I explain how to use the remaining punctuation marks.
So, I explain all 15 punctuation marks while focusing on only 5.
Question: How complicated can that be?
Answer: Not complicated at all.
In this course, I discuss:
Fundamental rules for punctuation
Placing punctuation relative to word spacing
Comma usage
Oxford Comma
Comma Alternatives
Uncommon Punctuation
Using Apostrophes for Possession and Contraction
Using Hyphenation to Join Words
Punctuating Dialog
The course concludes with an overview of all the rules (accompanied by a downloadable rule sheet) and a workshop in which I demonstrate how to write using the rules. Along the way, you'll be challenged with 6 quizzes and 6 homework assignments immediately following demonstration workshops captured in Microsoft Word. If you complete this course, you're writing will improve dramatically due to the fact that you will fully understand English punctuation!
So, here's what you should do:
Check out the course syllabus below for an overview of what you'll learn.
Then watch Lecture 2 for an overview of the Four Rules of Punctuation.
Conclude by enrolling in the course.
P.S. This course builds upon the information presented in my "Words and Space" course or equivalent knowledge.
I'll see you in the classroom,
---Brian
Who this course is for:
- Students brand new to English writing who want to learn to write using flawless punctuation.
- Students who are experienced with English writing who want to brush up on their writing skills by learning to write using flawless punctuation.
Instructor
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 6,046 Reviews
- 157,613 Students
- 31 Courses
I was born in the middle of the last century in Los Angeles, California. After moving for a time to the Silicon Valley, I graduated from Humboldt State University amid the redwoods of Northern California.
Two weeks after graduation I was working as a computer systems programmer for Lockheed Missiles and Space (LMSC) back in the Silicon Valley. Two months after that and I was married as I have been happy ever since (for 40 years).
After 14 years at Lockheed, I moved from working on IBM mainframes to using PCs running the Unix operating system and encountered a thing called the Internet. Cisco Systems seemed to be the right place to work, so I joined the company as their 650th employee. Eleven years later Cisco had grown to over 20,000 employees.
I retired at the age of 48 and instantly became bored!
Throughout my professional career, I'd always enjoyed both writing and providing technical training. So, I attended creative writing classes at my local junior college and began to write.
I managed to write and self-publish a handful of books, but things didn't take off until my wife, Melanie Jackson, an established author with a New York company, left traditional publishing to join me in self-publishing.
In 10 years, from 2010 to now, Melanie and I have made half-a-million dollars self-publishing well over 100 books. I also managed to record a pair of audiobooks for Amazon and Audible sale.
By 2014, our rapid rise to Kindle fame had already dwindled. I decided to pursue my second passion of giving training presentations.
Since 2014 I've published over 48 online video training courses for training sites such as Udemy and Skillshare. My goal is to provide low-cost high-quality screencast-based educational material focusing on my areas of expertise; namely, self-publishing and book cover design using the GIMP. I continue to expand my video training catalog while focusing some energy on resurrecting our flagging book sales using various marketing techniques. Finally, I spend a portion of my time maintaining both my website and my wife’s website, which was developed using WordPress.
I currently live in Las Vegas, Nevada, with my lovely wife and Butterscotch the cat.
I'll see you in the classroom,
---Brian