Fogarty - Your Guide to Writing it Right Grammar Girls Punctuation 911 Your Guide to Writing it Right

Any shortened form of a word is an abbreviation, for example, etc. for etcetera and Oct. for October; but acronyms are special kinds of abbreviations, such as ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) and OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), that can be pronounced as words. This makes them a subset of abbreviations. All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms.

Initialisms are another type of abbreviation. They are often confused with acronyms because they are made up of letters, so they look similar, but they cant be pronounced as words. FBI and CIA are examples of initialisms because theyre made up of the first letters of Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency, respectively, but they arent usually pronounced as words. (People have written in to tell me that insiders often say fibby for FBI, but its not something Ive ever heard used among the general public.) NASA, on the other hand, is an acronym because even though it is also made up of the first letters of the department name (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), it is pronounced as a word, NASA, and not by spelling out the letters N, A, S, A.

When you have an abbreviation at the end of a sentence, dont use a second period. The period at the end of the abbreviation becomes a super period (not the technical term) that does the task of both shortening the abbreviation and ending the sentence. (If you think losing the clear ending to a sentence will confuse your readers, its best to rewrite the sentence so the abbreviation doesnt come at the end, or write out the full word instead of using the abbreviation.) On the other hand, when you end a question or an exclamation with an abbreviation, you do include both the ending period of the abbreviation and the final question mark or exclamation point.

Squiggly always wanted to work for the F.B.I.

Doesnt Aardvark prefer the C.I.A.?

You think you already know how to ask questions, dont you? I wonder if youre right.

Everybody knows how to write a plain vanilla question: whats new? Theyre called direct questions. But there are trickier scenarios. What happens when a sentence seems to be half statement, half question? What if youre asking an indirect question, asking a question that also seems to require an exclamation point, dealing with a quotation that contains a question, and so on?

Sometimes even direct questions are tricky because they can look like statements, and the only way to tell your reader otherwise is to add a question mark. Theres a big difference in meaning between Squiggly went to the store. and Squiggy went to the store? Yet the only difference between the two sentences is that one ends with a period and one ends with a question mark. The question mark makes it a direct question that shows surprise. What the heck was he doing at the store?

What if you have a bunch of questions and you want to string them all together?

I love a scene in the movie Cats & Dogs where a dog realizes he can talk. It goes something like this: You can hear me? Can I have a cookie? two cookies? four cookies? twenty cookies? Those add-on questions at the end arent complete sentences but they each get a question mark anyway. Since they arent complete sentences, you usually dont capitalize the first letter, but the rules are vague. Some guides say to capitalize the first letter if the questions are nearly a sentence or have sentence-like status, so you have to use your own judgment. I dont consider two cookies to be nearly a sentence, but I may consider something like two cookies and a squeaking ball to chase to be nearly a sentence, which would make me consider capitalizing it.