If you don’t think that correct punctuation can make a huge difference in the meaning of what you write, consider this unpunctuated sentence:

A woman without her man is nothing.

OK? Here’s another version with the same words and different punctuation.

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

The key is that the punctuation changes the meaning of the word “her” from a possessive adjective (“her man”) to a pronoun (“without her”).

Imagine a language with no punctuation. Until the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Sanskrit writing had no punctuation, and the meaning of a sentence was inferred by its context.

– Thomas Hauck is a professional freelance book editor and ghostwriter.

Thomas Hauck, Ghostwriter and Book Editor