This all-in-one reference is a quick and easy way for book, magazine, online, academic, and business writers to look up sticky punctuation questions for all styles including AP (Associated Press), MLA (Modern Language Association), APA (American Psychological Association), and Chicago Manual of Style.

Punctuate with Confidence—No Matter the Style

Confused about punctuation? There’s a reason. Everywhere you turn, publications seem to follow different rules on everything from possessive apostrophes to hyphens to serial commas. Then there are all the gray areas of punctuation—situations the rule books gloss over or never mention at all. At last, help has arrived.
 
This complete reference guide from grammar columnist June Casagrande covers the basic rules of punctuation plus the finer points not addressed anywhere else, offering clear answers to perplexing questions about semicolons, quotation marks, periods, apostrophes, and more. Better yet, this is the only guide that uses handy icons to show how punctuation rules differ for book, news, academic, and science styles—so you can boldly switch between essays, online newsletters, reports, fiction, and magazine and news articles.

This handbook also features rulings from an expert “Punctuation Panel” so you can see how working pros approach sticky situations. And the second half of the book features an alphabetical master list of commonly punctuated terms worth its weight in gold, combining rulings from the major style guides and showing exactly where they differ. With The Best Punctuation Book, Period, you’ll be able to handle any punctuation predicament in a flash—and with aplomb.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of the weekly syndicated “A Word, Please” grammar column and a copy editor for the custom publishing department of the Los Angeles Times. She has worked as a reporter, features writer, city editor, proofreader, and copyediting instructor for UC San Diego Extension. She is the author of Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies, Mortal Syntax, and It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences. She lives in Pasadena, California, with her husband. Visit www.junecasagrande.com.

Introduction: Punctuation Is Easy, Except When It’s Not
How to Use This Book

Part I. Guidelines
Apostrophe
Comma
Period
Colon
Semicolon
Quotation Mark
Single Quotation Mark
Question Mark
Exclamation Point
Ellipsis
Hyphen
Em Dash
En Dash
Parenthesis
Bracket
Slash and Backslash
Lists
Numbers and Addresses


Part II. Punctuation A to Z


Appendix A: Understanding Grammatical Units:
Phrases, Clauses, Sentences, and Sentence Fragments
Appendix B: Identifying Parts of Speech for Better Punctuation
Acknowledgments
About the Author and Punctuation Panel
Index