Please, for the love of whoever you believe in, put a space after using punctuation! This is one of my biggest pet peeves!It's not this,or this. It's this! With a space! It gets so confusing when there isn't a space!
Periods... oh, there is a lot to unpack here...
If you are writing like this;
" ." They said.
That is incorrect. The period should be replaced with a comma, like this;
"," they said.
The T in they shouldn't be capitalized! However, if you're just writing the quote, like this;
"."
Without anything after it, that is correct.
Exclaimation points. These do not need to be replaced with a comma, along with question marks. However, an exclaimation point should be used when someone is yelling or exclaiming something! Not randomly!
Question marks. You learned this in primary school (grade 1 - 3), this should be easy. They are not to be replaced with commas and are only used for questions. Simple.
Semicolons. The suicide prevention symbol. It is used to continue a sentence; like this. Easy. That's why it's the prevention sign.
Colons! These are for lists and whatnot. Like this:
1) stop
2) using
3) them
4) randomly
Brackets or parenthesis. They should be used for adding extra information that cannot exactly be included in the sentence (a lot of people make the mistake of adding author's notes in them).
There are more, but I haven't seen many errors with the others.
