As the title of the wildly popular book about punctuation points out, commas are important. And if you don't know the joke, here it is.
A panda walks into a restaurant and orders a sandwich. After finishing the sandwich, the panda stands up, pulls out a gun, and shoots into the air as he is exiting. When the police arrest him, they asked him why he did that. He handed them a poorly punctuated wildlife book that had as an entry: Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.
The point is - punctuation really does matter. If you have a hard time with punctuation, buy the book with the same title as this header. It's a short book and quite well written. Here are a two extra rules to get you started.
Quotation marks " "
The use of quotation marks in writing policies, standards, and procedures is to show the reader the exact words described by a person, a dialog box, or found in documentation. This is called a direct quotation. You can convey the same meaning without the use of the quotation marks by paraphrasing the original statement.
Direct: The warning label states "do not handle without gloves."
Indirect: You must wear gloves if the warning label states not to handle without them.
Guideline 1: When using quotation marks, always put the closing quotation mark at the very end of what you are quoting, not at the end of every sentence or paragraph you are quoting.
Guideline 2: You should put quotation marks around all jargon or other expressions outside the normal usage of your readers. Do not put quotation marks around all technical terms (instead, add them to your glossary or terms list).
Guideline 3: All periods or commas go inside the last quotation mark, while colons and semicolons go outside the closing quotation mark.
Apostrophes
Let me set the record straight apostrophes are not used to indicate the plural. They are used in either contractions or to indicate possession.
Contractions
A contraction indicates that a letter has been omitted from a word. The contraction of doesn't stands for do not. The contraction won't stands for will not. Some common contractions are:
| can't | cannot |
| he's | he is |
| she'll | she will |
| isn't | is not |
| you've | you have |
Possession
Possession means that one thing belongs to another. For instance, the CIO's beer bottle denotes that the beer bottle in the sentence belongs to the CIO. There are three guidelines to help you place this apostrophe.
Guideline 1: For singular nouns the possession should be written as 's. "The administrator's logbook." Even if the singular noun already ends in an s. "Fred Jones's logbook."
Guideline 2: For plural nouns that end in s, the apostrophe should be added as the last character. "The administrators' logbooks."
Guideline 3: For plural words that do not end in s, the possession should be written as 's. "The IT staff's logbooks."
Brackets <> and [ ]
There are two types of brackets that we've seen in many policies, standards, and procedures.
The first set of brackets, the square brackets [ ] have been in use for quite some time within conventional writing. These should be used when clarifying a quote from someone or some thing. As an example, when quoting a memo about the proper method of adding tapes to a container "place the tapes [the ones you just took out of the tape library] into the container and seal it before shipping" the brackets here help define which tapes need to go into the container.
The newest type of brackets are the diagonal ones < > which used to simply be a math expression for lesser or greater than. However, the usage we see most often is that of enclosing a URL. Hence, in that sense it is denoting everything which must be copied in order for the URL to function correctly.