Friday, April 18, 2008

A little punctuation game we like to play...

I can remember being in middle school sitting around the dinner table while my high school aged sister and her future husband debated a question raised by my father: what are the eleven punctuation marks? The debate has continued for many many years, and occasionally one of us will get a phone call from our father with that same question: What are the eleven punctuation marks?

Test yourself. What are they? Post responses in the comments section...that's where my answer is going.

PS No cheating and looking at the keyboard; figure it out first!

5 comments:

Meredith said...

period, comma, quotation marks, apostrophe, dash, hyphen, exclamation point, question mark, parentheses, semicolon, colon.

That's my answer. Remember, it's up for debate. I can think of at least two more :-)

Zee said...

I came up with the following 9:
period, comma, quotation mark, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, colon, semi-colon, hyphen.

I will add parentheses from Meredith's answer.

That still leaves me one shy... I think I would choose to include a slash (/) before a dash.

Clearly, we need a fancy acronym for this so we can remember them all!

Meredith said...

We've got to toss ellipses and brackets on too for good measure...I'll work on that acronym!

Daniele said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Daniele said...

Check this out:
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/09/the-origin-of-everyday-punctuation-symbols/

And by the way, I'm the one who started that game after I heard a radio quiz about the eleven punctuation marks. But now that I'm doing some research, the answer I seem to find most often is fourteen...