ORTHOGRAPHY: Signos de puntuación / punctuation

Signos de puntuación.

( . ) Punto- 

We use the period in order to tell the reader he or she needs to make a long pause.

• Used at the end of a statement.
• Used at the end of an abbreviation.

( , ) Coma-

We mainly use it to make shorter pauses in a sentence, separate items on a list, or add explanatory phrases.

• Used to separate dependent and independent clauses.
• Used to separate elements in a list.
  • No coma used before conjunctions like y or o in Spanish.
• Used before question tags.

( : ) Dos puntos-

As in English, the colon is mainly used to indicate that what comes next is an explanation of what has just been said, an enumeration, a list, or a quote.

• Used also at the beginning of an email in Spanish.
  • ie, Querido José:

( ; ) Punto y coma-

• Use when you are making a list in order to separate the different items.
• Use the semicolon instead of the period in order to join independent clauses if they are closely related to each other.

Question and exclamation marks.

(¿ ?) Signo de apertura de interrogación y signo de cierre de interrogación– In Spanish, an upside-down question mark is used at the beginning of all questions and interrogative clauses and a normal question mark at the end of the question. Unlike English, statements and questions in Spanish can have the same syntax, the upside-down question mark is used to distinguish them.

ie, ¿cómo te llamas?

(¡ !) signo de apertura de exclamación y signo de cierre de exclamación– just as the question marks, exclamation marks precede and follow the exclamation sentence.

ie, ¡Hola!