The Most Common Punctuation Mistakes That Every College Student Should Avoid

As a college student, you will have to write a lot of academic papers. The first and the most of important requirement of an academic paper is that it should be free from the grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. The spelling and grammar are common things for us because we are familiar with them in an effective way but most of the students are not familiar with the punctuation. The use of different marks like full stop, brackets, commas, spacing, and conventional signs etc. is known as punctuation. If you are not able to write an academic paper that is free from the punctuation mistakes, then you can get help from the academic writing services. The most common punctuation mistakes that every college student should avoid are explained below;

1)    Extraneous apostrophes

The problem with the use of the extraneous apostrophes is that most of the students use them where they are not needed. For example, most of the students use these extraneous apostrophes in the sentences like that “Ten dollar’s off!”. This is totally a wrong thing. You can use these extraneous apostrophes in the possessive form or constraints like “My husband’s car” and “Shouldn’t” instead of “Should not”.

2)    Unnecessary quotation marks

There are a lot of students who use single or double quotations marks without quoting anything. For example, in the sentences like we don’t provide any kind of “offer in a village”. There is no need to use the quotation marks. The only way to use the single or double quotations marks is to quote something.

3)    Missing commas

There are a lot of college students who don’t take care of the usage of commas while writing any kind of an academic paper. This is not the best way to write an academic paper. Its reason is that these commas are very essential to break the different sentences and paragraphs. For example, “The favourite games of John are cricket, football, hockey, and tennis”.

4)    Too many commas

By keeping in mind the importance of commas, most of the students try to use too many commas in an academic paper. This is also a wrong thing. You can only use the commas on that place only where they are needed.

5)    Excess exclamation

The use of the exclamation marks in an academic paper is one of the most important things for us but the excess use of the exclamation marks is prohibited. Its reason is that the excess use of the exclamation marks can overwhelm the readers. Moreover, this can also become the cause of devaluating each exclamation point.

6)    Hyphen (-)  versus Dash (_)

If you want to combine two similar words or ideas, then you should use the hyphens to join them. On the other hand, if you want to combine two different ideas, then it is an unavoidable thing for you to use dash.

Moreover, you should also be careful while using the Oxford commas, semi-colons, colons, quotation mark placements, it’s, its, run-on sentences, periods, and exclamation marks etc.