A Study on the Use of Punctuation Marks

Abstract

The present research entitled 'A Study on the Use of Punctuation Marks' was carried out to find out total, correct and erroneous use of punctuation marks and compare boys and girls in terms of the use of punctuation marks. It mainly focused on finding out the proficiency of the students in the use of punctuation marks in writing. In order to fulfill these objectives, eighty students (40 boys and 40 girls) from four different public schools of Baitadi district were given test items related to the guided writing. In the selection of schools and students, the researcher used judgmental non-random sampling procedure and simple random sampling procedure respectively. The researcher found that fullstop has the highest frequency (i.e. 34.42%) and slash has the lowest frequency (i.e. 1.02%) of the total use. This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter introduces, langue and parole, speech and writing, writing, mechanics of writing, punctuation marks in detail with various types and functions, error analysis, review of literature, objectives, etc. under different headings and sub-headings. The second chapter deals with methodology of the research. It includes sources of data collection, tools, sampling procedures, etc. The third chapter deals with the analysis and interpretation of the collected data. It presents the frequency of total, correct and erroneous use of punctuation under different sub-headings. The fourth chapter deals with the major findings and recommendations. Except these, different supportive materials such as references, research tool, marking scheme and tables which were used during the research are presented in the appendices section of the thesis.