Abstract:
This study intends to describe the difficulties students face while using punctuation marks in their
writing. Punctuation mark plays an important role in conveying the meaning of a text. It remains
an essential skill for good writing. The purpose of the study is to examine the difficulties of using
punctuation marks and to identify the most common errors the students make while using
punctuation marks. The study is conducted for the first, second, and third-year students: from the
academic years, respectively, who take English as their main subject from the Faculty of Islamic
Studies and the Arabic language. 56 students were taken as samples by using a purposive sampling
technique to conduct the research. In order to analyze the data, an authentic text was distributed
to the students without any punctuation marks, and the data were analyzed manually. A qualitative
textual analysis is used in order to conduct this research. Furthermore, the punctuation marks
focused on in this research are the comma, full stop, exclamation mark, inverted commas, question
marks, apostrophe, and hyphen. As a result of the findings, it reveals that students make errors in
using these punctuation marks. Omission (79%) is the most common type of error the students
make, and 96.64% of the hyphens were due to omitting it in places where it should be placed,
whereas this particular percentage of apostrophes and commas were identified as 75.45% and
64.88%, respectively. Though they are students who take English as their main subject, they still
have issues in using punctuation marks due to their carelessness, lack of attention, and motivation
to mark it correctly. Besides, their lack of understanding of the rules of using punctuation marks
plays a major role in the difficulties of using it.
