Punctuation Post

One punctuation rule I learned about this week was the way to properly use nicknames. I don’t see them very much in my writing so I wasn’t really familiar with the rule. The rule is that when using a nickname only put it in quotation marks the very first time. Every time it is mentioned after that in a document it does not need the quotation marks.

A good way to remember that would be to think of it in a “real world” situation. You would introduce your friend to someone named William but they like to go by the nickname “Bucky”. You wouldn’t keep saying William but his nickname is Bucky. That would be redundant and annoying for everyone to keep hearing. Seeing Bucky in quotation marks each time it’s written would have the same effect. Your reader wouldn’t want to keep seeing a “reintroduction”.

I saw this punctuation error on Facebook. As someone mentioned earlier, there are a lot of editing mistakes you can find on Facebook. I felt like it was very fitting for what we have gone over this week. There is an unnecessary comma in this meme. An apostrophe missing in the contraction: that’s. The meme should read: There is a town in Norway called Hell and it freezes over almost every winter. That’s metal.