So what are the basic building blocks of good punctuation? I'm assuming you are at least a little smarter than poor Charly. One quality he had was persistence - can you do as well as he did?

Capitals and Full-stops

These are the 'backbones' of your writing. A properly constructed sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full-stop, or period, as the Americans say. And don't forget, when you use the singular, personal pronoun 'I' - it MUST be a capital letter! Do not, under any circumstances, write 'i did this' or 'i think so and so'. It is ignorant and looks unintelligent. You want to be an expert, don't you? :-)

Exclamation marks and Question marks

Both of these are simply another way of concluding a sentence. Exclamation marks are normally used to make a special point or...well...exclamation. Use them sparingly and carefully. And don't use three of them together. It looks really dumb!!!

Question marks are simply used if you are asking a question...really?

Do you think linen dog bedding is too expensive? Maybe not! Check out our prices...

Commas

These get a special page of this training all to themselves. They are quite horrible, but completely necessary, little devils. You must use them in at least three specific parts of your sentences, so head over to page 6 and learn the tricks.

Colons and Semi-colons...

...have nothing whatever to do with your bowels even though they may be a pain in the a**e!!! (Sorry - too many exclamation marks and a very bad pun as well) See page 6 for a full explanation and some examples.

Quotation marks

These are used for...amazingly enough...quotations. When you are quoting someone else's written or spoken words, you need to use quotation marks. This is called a 'direct quotation' And remember, they must always be used in pairs like this: "and"

Mr Bassett from the Sad Hound's Association said "Linen dog bedding is best for old dogs".

You use quotation marks because you are 'quoting' Mr Jones. If you wrote...

Mr Jones from the Sad Hound's Association believes linen dog bedding is best for old dogs...

... you don't need quotation marks. This is called an indirect quotation.

They are also used to designate some irony or reservation, for example, you may think that it is ridiculous for dogs to need linen bedding so you would write:

Mr Jones suggested that linen bedding was 'necessary' for older dogs.

The quotation marks indicate that you don't actually subscribe to this belief!

Double or Single?

In general, I use double quotation marks for speech and single quotation marks for designation of irony (like I did in the sentence above) or for technical terms, jargon and certain proper names. For example, 'Bartlett Pears' and 'genetic incompatibility' and 'direct quotation'. I don't think there are any hard and fast rules. Just be consistent throughout your website.

There are other uses, but get some of these right and you'll be doing well.

Aggravating Apostrophes

It's a disease. Completely incurable (as yet). I have been known to correct the usage of apostrophes on the back of toilet doors. I correct handwritten signs advertising tomato's and potatoe's - heaven help me - nothing brings out the pedant in me quicker than an incorrect apostrophe. Especially when someone should know better. Like an expert!

Parentheses (brackets)

Fairly self-explanatory and I probably use too many of them. But they do add a little bit of interest to your writing and there are times that they are required. For example, you need them when you are including an alternative meaning for a word like I did in the heading. You might be writing some technical jargon that you don't think everyone will understand. So you put an alternative (different) word in brackets (parentheses). Get it?

Next up - commas.

P.S. There is a deliberate mistake on page 9. Find it and PM me - don't write it in the comments section. Any other errors - please let me know in the comments.