Hello there, everyone.

I do have to say that the punctuation chapter really surprised me.  I used to write quite a bit for a previous job, but never realized how many different rules there actually are.  Maybe they didn’t apply, or perhaps I was more concerned with spelling at the time.  It certainly wasn’t a journalism position so I’m sure that some other poor soul had to edit my work.

One rule from the textbook that I definitely didn’t know was regarding quotation marks: “the period and comma always go inside the quotation marks.” I believe in high school I was taught differently; that if it ends the sentence, it goes outside the quotation marks.  Perhaps because they just taught basic English and not a journalism writing style.

I also have always struggled with using a hyphen so most of the time, I have found a way to rephrase sentences and omit them from my writing. Going forward, I can be more confident. I will hopefully find more uses for them to make my writing more dramatic and interesting.

The punctuation mistakes I found this week were in an online article I was reading.  I copied it below.

If you stop to quickly Google traffic conditions before you rush out the door, you’re not alone. In fact, searches for “traffic jams” may actually be able to predict congestion before it happens, according to new research in PLOS One. 
The study compared German Google searches for stau, or traffic jam, to reports of traffic jams reported by ADAC, a major German auto club. Author Nikolaos Askitas of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn found that Google searches for road conditions peaked two hours before reports of traffic jams, both during morning rush hours (between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.) and the end-of-day rush between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. He used a program that scraped traffic data from ADAC every five minutes between September 28, 2015 and November 14, 2015. He linked these to weekly Google searches provided by Google Trends. 
After controlling for variations in time and day of the week, Askitas argues that 80 percent of variation in traffic conditions can be linked to preceding Google search spikes.
 
“A one percent increase in Google [searches for traffic jams] implies a .4 percent increase of traffic jams,” he writes in the study. 

The data isn’t comprehensive, but it represents a proof-of-concept for using search engines to examine wide-spread societal behavior. More research might be able to create further predictions of future behavior, and, in the case of traffic, lead to preventative measures.

I found that in the second paragraph a comma should be used to set off the month, day and year. In the final paragraph, there should be no comma before “and” because “in the case of traffic, lead to preventative measures” is not an independent clause.

I hope everyone has a great week!