188 



Till: STANDARD DICTIONARY OF FACTS 



i of the country, they should begin with 

 capitals; as, I am going West; he is a repr> 



South; tlu river : 



her before or after geo- 



>al nouns are capitali/.ed; as. F.ne Canal, 

 Hud* Railroad. Strait of Magellan, 



Coe Place, Shenandoah Valley, though many 

 publishers omit the capital for the generic word. 

 when it precedt .TIM: as, county 



-tate of New York, empire of 

 BlMMt, 



act qualine>. when personified, 

 lie capitalized; as, O Death! where is 

 -tint:. Then Crime ran riot. 

 "l.">. All q that are intended to be 



emphatic, or that consist of a complete sentence. 

 should begin with a capital 



Then Elijah said. "Thou art the man." 



08, "What are we?" and 

 "Whither do we tend?" will at all times press 



ijK>n thoughtful minds, 

 ii a quotation is introduced by that it 

 should begin with a small letter; as, " He said 

 ik great patriot bequeathed to his heirs 

 the sword which he had worn in the war for 

 liberty, and charged them never to take it from 

 the scabbard but in self defense, or in defense 

 untry and her freedom." 



16. In writing resolutions, the worcl immedi- 



Resolved, should begin with a 

 capital. See Punctuation, Comma, Rule 13. 



Rewired, That the discovery of smokeless gunpowder 

 has increased the horrors of war. 



17. Abbreviations should be followed with a 

 period; as, Geo., Co., Gen., LL. D., D. D., Dr., etc. 



PUNCTUATION 



Punctuation is the art of breaking up a sen- 

 tence by means of points and stops, so as to 

 convey to the reader's mind, as quickly and 

 easily as possible, the writer's meaning. There 

 are two systems of punctuation, the close and 

 the open. The close system is used in legal 

 documents, laws, ecclesiastical formularies, and 

 in precise composition of every sort. Even 

 the omission of a hyphen from a compound 

 word may make a serious error. The insertion 

 of a comma in place of a hyphen between " fruit " 

 and "seeds" in an enactment of Congress cost 

 the government thousands of dollars. The 

 loose punctuation should be used in ordinary 

 de-rriptivc writing. Formerly too many marks 

 were used; to-day the tendency is toward the 

 use of too few marks. Punctuation can surely 

 not be classed among the exact sciences. It 

 is not even an established system, for many of 

 the rules of the teachers differ, and the practice 

 of their pupils differs still more. Points may be 

 omitted or inserted in a catalogue in a way that 

 would not be tolerated hi a history. 



However, there are some explicit directions 

 that may be given that all writers should follow, 

 oints should be used to show the gram- 

 matical relation of words, and never solely to 

 indicate rhetorical pauses in reading. 



The necessity for a knowledge of correct 

 punctuation is well illustrated by this anecdote : 

 "The following request is said to have been 

 made at church: * A sailor going to sea, his wife 



desires the prayers of the congregation for his 

 >afety.' But, by an unhappy transposition of 

 the comma, the note was read thus: 'A sailor 

 going to see his wife, desires the prayers of the 

 congregation for his safety.' " 



The marks used for punctuation are the per- 

 iod [.], colon [ :], semicolon [ ;], comma [,], interro- 

 gation point [?], exclamation point [!], dash [ ], 

 parenthesis (), brackets [], hyphen [-], double 

 quotation marks [" "], single quotation marks 

 [' ']. apostrophe [']. 



Period. 1. All declarative and imperative 

 sentences, and sentences that are interrogative 

 in form, but to which an answer is not expected, 

 should be followed by a period ; as, He has gone. 

 Go at once. Ah! whither now are fled those 

 dreams of happiness. The Cyprians asked me 

 why I wept. 



2. All abbreviations, unless the ellipsis of 

 intermediate letters in the words has been in- 

 dicated by using the apostrophe, should be fol- 

 lowed by the period; 7th, 9th, 3d, etc., are not 

 followed by the period. 



3. When capitals are used for numerals, it 

 was customary formerly to follow them by a pe- 

 riod; e. g., Henry VIIL, John IV. 3. The latest 

 usage seems to omit the period, especially in the 

 possessive construction; as, Henry VIII's reign. 



Comma. 1. All nouns of direct address 

 should be set off by commas; as, John, come 

 here. I say, Mary, can you go now ? Sir, I can- 

 not do it. 



2. When there are three or more parts in the 

 subject of a sentence, and the conjunction is 

 used between the last two only, a comma should 

 be used after each part except the last. 



Mary Lee and Laura came yesterday. As 

 the sentence stands, you may think that there 

 are but two persons that came yesterday; viz., 

 Mary Lee and Laura. If the sentence is written 

 Mary, Lee and Laura came yesterday, then 

 Mary may be a noun of direct address, and the 

 boy Lee and the girl Laura came; but if it is 

 written, Mary, Lee, and Laura came, you know 

 that three persons came. The comma before 

 the and is frequently omitted by rapid writers ; 

 but it should not be omitted in this compound 

 construction. 



3. Parenthetical or additional expressions, that 

 is, those expressions that break the directness of 

 the statement, require to be cut off by commas ; 

 as, Christopher Columbus, an Italian by birth, 

 discovered America. It is mind, after all, that 

 does the work of the world. In this sentence, 

 ' after all ' does not modify ' does/ but shows a 

 connection between this sentence and something 

 gone before. Another illustration would be, It 

 was not necessary, however, for you to go. 



Some of the phrases in common use that are 

 usually set off by commas are : in short, in fact, 

 in reality, in brief, as it happens, no doubt, in a 

 word, to be sure, to be brief, etc. Some of the 

 words used parenthetically, which, according 

 to the close punctuation should be set off by 

 commas, and according to the loose, should not 

 be, are: therefore, then, however, perhaps, 

 namely, indeed, too, moreover, etc. 



Most of these words named last are capable 

 of two constructions, they may either belong 

 to the proposition as a whole, or to a single word 



