1. The use of specific marks to clarify the meanings of written material by grouping words grammatically into sentences, clauses, and phrases: Punctuation does for writing and printing what pauses and changes of voice do for speech.
2. The process or an instance of adding certain marks, such as question marks, commas, semicolons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, parentheses, brackets, apostrophes, and asterisks to groups of written words: The use of punctuations provides tools to indicate pauses, quotations, and to clarify meanings or inflections (changes in the basic forms of words, such as to show tenses, singulars and plurals, etc.).