Punctuation is generally correct

 

 

In order to achieve a high standard of academic writing, it is essential that punctuation is used correctly throughout a piece of work.

 

Some key punctuation marks to remember are:

- Colons (:). Colons are to be used before doing a bullet pointed lists.

- Semi colons (;). Semi colons are to be used when doing lists within the text.

- Ellipsis (…). Ellipsis’ are used in academic writing when missing out part of a quote.

- Quotation marks (‘) Quotation marks need to be used correctly within their placement of the text. It is essential to remember how they affect the placement of other punctuation. A full stop would always be placed before the end of the quotation mark.

Refer to extract 1.

 

Extract 1:

It has been argued that many psychics use cold reading to make their claims.1 Cold reading is a method employed by psychics whereby they are able to convince the sitter they can read their mind when in reality they are making their claims based on the sitter’s body language2, (Hyman, 2007). Psychics can make a vague and highly general claim and sitters will ask ‘are you sure’ or ‘I can take everything but this’, (Hyman, 2007).3 For this reason, more people should consider whether the psychic should have room for mistakes if they are claiming that the spirit is on the stage talking to them.4 Equally, it may be useful to consider that as noted in the introduction, if these interactions are televised they may appear even more credible as the psychic’s mistakes can be cut out. Fortunately5, this kind of research can help people to approach these situations with less of an open mind.6