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Communication: Written English | 253

2. the precise density of structural/functional words (for example articles
or prepositions) for making the sentence grammatically complete;
3. active words that help our decoders immediately grasp the idea.

In brief, we so adopt and select words that we choose words that commu-
nicate and we prefer words that help our decoder visualize the content.
Our communication, thus, becoming less and less ambiguous, our writing
becomes a pleasure for our decoders.

PUNCTUATION

Now that we know how to string effective words together meaningfully, let
us look at the mechanics of writing that make our communication further
easier to grasp for our decoders.
Punctuation indeed plays a major part in making writing easy to grasp.
In his book, entitled Spoken and Written English (Oxford University Press,
1989), the great linguist M.A.K. Halliday maintains that punctuation, or the
mechanics of writing, has the following functions:
i. Marking the boundary, e.g., a comma marks off a phrase, a list, etc.
ii. Marking the status, e.g., a full-stop or an exclamation mark at the end
of a sentence decides its status as a statement or an exclamation.
iii. Marking relationship, e.g., a hyphen suggests that a word is a com-
pound word or the apostrophe‘s’ explains what belongs to whom.
In other words, punctuation as the mechanics of writing gives our writing a
spoken clarity and intonation/stress effect. Hence, let us try to understand
here the major punctuation marks and their basic usage. Do look up the
books in the Bibliography for more details.

Capitalization

i. Capitalize the first alphabet of the word after a full stop.
e.g., She was happy. Her happiness reflected itself in her very being.
ii. Always capitalize ‘I’.
iii. Acronyms are often capitalized.

e.g., The UNICEF helps disadvantaged children.
iv. Capitalize proper nouns, that is, the names of places, people, coun-
tries, for example.

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