Look at the following passage:

Miss crocodile hearing mr. jackal coming held her breath and lay like a big log pretending to be dead bless my stars cried mr. jackal how very sad here’s poor miss crocodile stone dead and all of love for me dear dear yet I don’t think she can be quite dead for dead folks always wag their tails on this miss crocodile began to wag her tail very gently and mr. jackal ran off roaring with laughter and saying oho oho so dead folks always wag their tails.

This passage from an old Indian story is difficult to read as it is posted here, because there are no signs where to stop as we read it. The different signs we use to help the reader are punctuation marks. The word Punctuation comes from a Latin word meaning a point or mark. Now let us look at the passage from the old story as it should be printed, with all the proper punctuation marks.

Miss Crocodile, hearing Mr. Jackal coming, held her breath and lay like a big log, pretending to be dead.

‘Bless my stars!’ said Mr. Jackal, ‘how very sad! Here’s poor Miss Crocodile stone dead, and all of love for me. Dear, dear! Yet I don’t think she can be quite dead, for dead folks always wag their tails.’ On this Miss Crocodile began to wag her tail very gently, and Mr. Jackal ran off, roaring with laughter and saying: ‘Oho! Oho! So dead folk always wag their tails!’

In the above passage there are twenty-seven punctuation marks, of six different kinds. When we make a list of them, under their different forms, we should get:—

1. Full Stop .
2. Exclamation mark !
3. Interrogation mark ?
4. Comma ,
5. Semicolon ;
6. Colon :
7. Apostrophe ’
8. Hyphen -
9. Dash —
10. Quotation marks or Inverted commas “ ” ‘ ’
11. Brackets () [] {} <>