Elements of Style Chapter Three

This brief chapter was about matters of form such as the use of colloquialisms, margins, headings, hyphens, numerals, quotations and parentheses. One key point that especially applied to my writing was the use of punctuation after parentheses. The book states that punctuation marks must be placed outside the parentheses unless a whole statement is in parentheses. Another point that I learned was that formal citations  are introduced by a colon. I never heard of this before and therefore will apply it to my writing in the future. Additionally, I was not aware of the omitting of A or The from titles if I place the possessive before it. The book uses the example, The Tale of Two Cities would be Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. I was always confused about this when it came up in my writing but now that has been cleared up.