Skip to main content

Exercise : Punctuation Exercise

OWL logo

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.



Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.


Put in semicolons, colons, dashes, quotation marks, Italics (use an underline), and parentheses where ever they are needed in the following sentences.

1. The men in question Harold Keene, Jim Peterson, and Gerald Greene deserve awards.

2. Several countries participated in the airlift Italy, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.

3. There's no room for error, said the engineer so we have to double check every calculation.

4. Judge Carswell later to be nominated for the Supreme Court had ruled against civil rights.

5. In last week's New Yorker, one of my favorite magazines, I enjoyed reading Leland's article How Not to Go Camping.

6. Yes, Jim said, I'll be home by ten.

7. There was only one thing to do study till dawn.

8. Montaigne wrote the following A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

9. The following are the primary colors red, blue, and yellow.

10. Arriving on the 8 10 plane were Liz Brooks, my old roommate her husband and Tim, their son.

11. When the teacher commented that her spelling was poor, Lynn replied All the members of my family are poor spellers. Why not me?

12. He used the phrase you know so often that I finally said No, I don't know.

13. The automobile dealer handled three makes of cars Volkswagens, Porsches, and Mercedes Benz.

14. Though Phil said he would arrive on the 9 19 flight, he came instead on the 10 36 flight.

15. Whoever thought said Helen that Jack would be elected class president?

16. In baseball, a show boat is a man who shows off.

17. The minister quoted Isaiah 5 21 in last Sunday's sermon.

18. There was a very interesting article entitled The New Rage for Folk Singing in last Sunday's New York Times newspaper.

19. Whoever is elected secretary of the club Ashley, or Chandra, or Aisha must be prepared to do a great deal of work, said Jumita, the previous secretary.

20. Darwin's On the Origin of Species 1859 caused a great controversy when it appeared.

Go to Answers