Is the pause you wish to create with a punctuation mark and the information that will follow it subject to the precise rules of the colon and semicolon? If so, use the appropriate one. If essential, use the comma, or, if you really want to draw attention to it, use the more powerful em dash.
If nonessential, use the comma if you wish to discreetly add the information; parentheses if you wish to make it a bit more noticeable; and the em dash if you want to draw maximum attention. What of the N-dash? The other four are well defined, useful and often ignored even in published material. I wonder why. It annoys me that many modern writers and publishers have decided to eliminate the comma from their writing.
When I see it used to convey a pause, I scream a little in my head never out loud, though. If not ellipses to indicate a dramatic or long pause, then what? Personally I love using the ellipses to convey a long pause. If not, I think there should be.
I see nothing wrong with braudening the use of the ellipses past its formally taught purpose. Just my opinion. I dunno. Good description of punctuation use. Style guides vary on this point about en dashes, but the Gregg Reference Manual does support you.
Thanks for pointing this out. How does one indicate a dramatic pause as if a dejected sigh within a sentence? Hello Edward, The ellipsis serves more than one purpose. In quoted material, it indicates missing text. What about this new trend of people using period for the purpose of pause. Question: In the age of emojis, where do I put them in relation to all punctuation? In particular quotation use, at varying points within a sentence.
Is this conversation happening somewhere? One technique is to add the word [pause] every time you need to pause. Today, [pause] I'm going to talk about a person [pause] who was a shy kid during his school days. Another technique is to break your speech text into a list of short pieces, one per line. When practising, pause whenever the line ends. Researchers have found that when you read out loud, people only use short and medium pauses, but spontaneous speech speaking without reading shows a more frequent use of medium and long pauses.
So, if you have to read a part of your speech, it is important to deliberately lengthen your pauses to copy a more natural spontaneous speech style. Effectively using pauses in speech will make your ideas easier to understand. RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.
RMIT Training. RMIT University. Search field. Pauses Part 1 - How to improve your speaking. How much seconds for punctuation when we read a loud text? Ask Question. Asked 4 years, 7 months ago. Active 4 years, 7 months ago. Viewed 3k times. I have one question that when we read text for comma, semi-colon we use approximately 1 second of pause and for period and colon there is 2 second of pause but I also want to know about following: Quotation mark Hyphen Dash Question mark not at end of sentence Exclamation mark not at end of sentence.
Improve this question. Aman Aman. A whole second for a comma is an enormously long time, unless you're reading very slowly amplified in a large building, for example. From your previous question on ELU , it appears there may be a misunderstanding about pausing and intonation. Generally in speech, pauses are very short and punctuation is indicated by intonation -- which is best demonstrated by hearing.
You may find [unabridged] audiobooks useful, where you can follow the text as it's being read. Can your clause stand alone as a sentence? It's independent. There's two independent clauses: look, you can break that sentence into two sentences and it still makes sense.
If your clause can't stand as a sentence on its own, then you've got a dependent clause right there. For example, if you take the sentence:. That second sentence doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense. You need the first bit with the bagels and the refusal and all for the second to be meaningful.
That's a dependent clause. So that's dependent versus independent clauses. That's what we need to talk about here. How you're building your sentence determines whether and where to use a semicolon. It's as easy as this: if you've got two independent clauses and you want them to share a sentence, they're going to need a little more space than a comma can provide.
Call on your pal the semi-colon.
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