Richard De A'Morelli

✔ Teachers can use this book to help students learn basic concepts of punctuation without the stress and tears.

For example, Chicago Manual of Style, the world’s most widely referenced style guide, advises that numbers up to one hundred must be spelled out, and values over that should be written as digits. Thus we would write: The alphabet has twenty-six letters, and a year has 365 days

The lowly commas, periods, and other marks inserted into your sentences are like road signs; without them, readers would get lost in a confusing jumble of words.

Without punctuation, everything we write would be susceptible to ambiguity and misinterpretation. Even when punctuation is used, but it is used incorrectly, readers are at risk of serious misunderstandings.

Read through your own manuscript and apply the same principle—look for natural pauses. Do you have missing commas? If so, add them. Conversely, if you find a comma where you don’t feel a natural pause occurs, consider removing it