Holy Slash! The Top 10 Punctuation Marks

We love the semicolon, even if it's often misused; it's so beautiful and so unique. Many people seem to not know how to properly employ a semicolon; they use them in place of commas and periods. Properly, they should be used to join two related independent clauses or to set apart items in a list with internal punctation; what a ... handy little mark!


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Commas are, like, the most common punctuation mark, and NewsFeed is always afraid that we are using too many of them, even though most people will say it's totally fine as long as you don't have a run-on sentence.

NewsFeed is often excited! And we want often want to make sure that people understand the arguments we make! So we tend to use exclamation marks! A lot!

We like people, but many times we find them ... boring. An ellipsis lets us cut out all the boring things people say and get straight to the good stuff. It also helps if you want to add a 'beat' to get the timing of a sentence [puts on sunglasses] ... just write.

We're not going to lie, we are often unsure of ourselves, which makes the slash NewsFeed's best friend. Many a text message from our phones goes something like this: "Hey, want to hang out/go out sometime tonight/this weekend/next week?" We're all about covering all of our bases/projecting an image of weakness.

Everyone uses parentheses. (Indeed, NewsFeed is probably guilty of using them too much.) Brackets, though, are like parentheses' awesome older brother. Journalists use them to replace words in quotes, or to insert a gentle smackdown with a [sic]. Serious journalists like NewsFeed also use them for inside-baseball info. [Full ... discosure: NewsFeed is not a serious journalist.] Stay away from their kooky cousin the curly bracket, though ( { } ). Outside of computer programming, we have no idea how to use them.

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No matter what form it takes — the humble en-dash, joining words together, or the swaggering em-dash, jumping in wherever it likes — NewsFeed loves the dash.

NewsFeed is a jealous sort: If something is ours then it is ours, dangit! If it wasn't for the apostrophe, how could we say that something is NewsFeed's chair, NewsFeed's food, NewsFeed's parking space? Contrary to what some people might think, though, they are not NewsFeed's CD's or NewsFeed's snack's.

If you don't use these, your prose sucks. Period.

The interrobang?! Sounds scary. What is it?! Simple: It's a combination exclamation mark-question mark that you use when you don't want to use a whole bunch of ?!?!!s that make you look like a 1950s movie poster. It hasn't exactly caught on yet, but with a name like that, we're sure it will eventually. How couldn't it?!