Punctuation

Single quotes are used around a chapter title, section heading, phrases and other quoted text which is not active speech, for example:

Refer also to ‘Information and Advice’ under the section ‘Courses Available in the Faculty’. Note that the full stop falls outside the quote in this case.

Double quotes are used for quoting speech with single quotes within double quotes like this:

“Jane and I are going to the theatre,” said Bob. “We will see three plays including ‘Macbeth’.”
or
Mary commented, “I felt the acting was superb.”

When several consecutive paragraphs are quoted, quotation marks are repeated only at the beginning of each paragraph, and closed at the end of the last paragraph.

An alternative to this is to indent the whole quoted passage, set it in smaller type and omit quotation marks.

Book titles and compositions (in the widest sense) are set in italics:

Trio in F
Moby Dick
A Poem for Mary

but chapters of books, individual plays, names of radio programmes, are in inverted commas:

‘The Final Chapter’
‘The Ham Funeral’ (‘The Ham Funeral’ might appear in Patrick White, An Anthology)
‘Radio Daze’.

A dash OR a colon is used, not a dash and a colon:

Students going on the trip are advised to bring along the following items:
     torch
     sleeping bag
     blankets

Students are requested to respond by—
     (a) writing to the school; or
     (b) filling in the required form.

Contrary to spoken English, when making a plural noun possessive, an s is added. So:

Jones’s is written, though not voiced.

The possessive apostrophe is sometimes omitted where a plural noun has adjectival force:

Secondary Teachers College
Schools Liaison Officer.

When referring to degrees, the possessive apostrophe (but not a capital letter except for a particular degree) is used:

He received a bachelor’s degree.
They received Master of Arts degrees. She now has two master’s degrees.

Although it is becoming generally less common, the hyphen is still retained in compound adjectives:

‘a sweet-shop assistant’ differentiates the person from a ‘sweet shop assistant’.

Adverbs are not joined to adjectives, however, unless ambiguity threatens:

an extremely good example
a hardworking person

Directions have no hyphen (southeast) and are capitalised only as part of a place or area name (Southeast Asia) or in designating a district (WA’s Southwest) but not otherwise (southwestern Australia).

Ages are hyphenated:

10-year-old
10- to 11-year-old group.

Part-time, full-time and sub-unit are hyphenated; first year is not (unless it is used as an adjective):

In the first year of his course he did two part-time units. The following year he studied full-time as a first-year student.