punctuation

Siri is turning out to be a great assistant for iPhone 4S owners.

Using Siri to compose e-mails or messages for you while on the go is fairly easy and straightforward. One thing that can be a bit of a pain, though, is the lack of punctuation used by Siri while composing those messages for you.

While Siri may not be able to insert punctuation automatically, you can tell Siri where and what type of punctuation you want to use in your messages.

To get Siri to use punctuation, you only need to speak the punctuation during the composition of … Read more

There were many people, quite a few in America, who were excited, delighted, even positively beaming when some clever cove created that smiley colon/parenthesis thing that is now the universal sign of a written smile.

:) That's the one. The one that is sometimes written as ":0" or ":-)" or, for a smiling wink, ";)." Or even, and this is far beyond my intellectual galaxy, "J". Does that signify "JOKINGYOUMORON!!!!!!!!"? I think that it does.

All these symbols have been such great successes in bringing people together and making them … Read more

Teachers can test their reading and writing students' skills with Edit Prep. The program creates worksheets that students can proofread for correct punctuation and grammar usage, or read for contextual clues to test their reading comprehension skills.

We tried each of Edit Prep's three sections: Proofreading, Comprehension, and CLOZE Worksheet, which deals with finding contextual clues in passages of text. The program has a selection of sample text from well-known works of literature from which you can generate worksheets, or users can import passages from sources outside the program. We think teachers will enjoy this option, because they can … Read more

As you probably know, the iPhone attempts to auto-correct as you type. If you key in "blogget," for example, it'll automatically replace it with "blogger" when you hit the space bar. But did you know the iPhone can compensate for missing punctuation as well?

Try it. Type "can't" without the apostrophe (and then hit Space). Presto: the iPhone fills it in for you. Same goes for words like "don't," "isn't," and "you're."

What this means is you can tap along without switching to … Read more