Right Mark, Right Word: Punctuation at Work

Straight from the course’s own notes.

Rules quoted from published guides

Every rule on a card and every M0 Answer is built from passages quoted word for word from 22 saved pages, all read 2026-10-13: 8 Wikipedia articles (CC BY-SA; last edited between 17 July and 9 October 2026), Strunk’s “The Elements of Style” (Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920 printing, from Project Gutenberg; no US copyright), the GOV.UK A to Z style guide (Open Government Licence v3.0) and 12 Wiktionary entries (CC BY-SA; last edited between 8 May and 13 October 2026). A script checks all 57 quotes on the saved copies and fails if a page changes; it does not re-fetch the live pages. The cards also carry a few short notes of the course’s own: the “it is / it has” gap test, the you are / who is test, “a full stop is always safe”, and what the course leaves out.

Sentences built by script, rules applied by a small coded test

Every A/B pair and every Fix sentence is built from one template and one named slip, so the wrong sentence is exactly the slip its row names, and the key’s change turns a Fix sentence into the right one (36 sentences, 29 wrong-answer rows). A coded test per rule family then applies the quoted rule using word lists made from the items: the word after the gap for its/it’s, owner cues for the possessive, a subject and a verb on each side of the comma and no conjunction for the comma splice (the wrong fix in one of the splice questions is shown to still be a splice, and its accepted fixes are not), and so on. These tests check that each key follows the rule as quoted; they don’t parse English in general.

Judged, not computed

For the look-alike words (M3) a script holds a table from each sense to its word, built from the quoted definitions; that a given sentence needs that sense is the course’s reading, shown in the working beside the definition. Cue words and word lists in the other modules are also the course’s own.

Points the guides split on are left out, not drilled

The comma before “and” in a list (Wikipedia: “There is no universally accepted standard for its use.”), the possessive of a singular noun ending in s, plurals of abbreviations, letters and numbers, hyphens after -ly adverbs and in dictionary compounds, the comma after an opening phrase, comma splices in informal writing or between very short similar clauses (every splice item has at least one clause of 7 words or more, so none is the very short case), fewer and less, and semicolons. GOV.UK says “Do not use semicolons as they are often mis-read.”; Strunk and Wikipedia say a semicolon can join two independent clauses. The course teaches the semicolon as one fix for a comma splice, but no key ever depends on a semicolon being better than a full stop. Three keys follow a quoted rule although the same page hedges, and the cards say so: a colon after a fragment (two of them) and affect as a noun (one).

Honest limits

Text only, and no source here is connected to this course. It drills the quoted rules on its own sentences; it can’t tell whether a sentence of yours suits your employer’s style guide. Where the saved sources disagree or hedge, the point is left out (see above).

Not in it yet

Capital letters, quotation marks, dashes, parentheses, the serial comma, commas after opening phrases, fewer/less, complement/compliment, sentence grammar.