SUMMARY
The present study was conducted to determine the level of college students in punctuation marks and to recommend solutions for this problem. The study was conducted with the quantitative method, and content and description analysis techniques were utilized. The study group included 204 students (157 female and 57 male). An anonymous short story manuscript without the punctuation marks was used as the data collection instruments. The students were asked to edit the manuscript including the punctuation marks based on essay writing rules. In the original text, eight punctuation marks were used. Descriptive tests such as t-Test, One-Way ANOVA, Tukey’s HSD were used in the analysis of the collected data with IBM SPSS Statistics 22 software. The data obtained with the student manuscripts were analyzed to determine student knowledge and skill levels on punctuation marks and whether there were differences between the findings based on student department and gender. Findings demonstrated that majority of students used only the period correctly. The students made the highest rate of mistakes with the dash punctuation mark with 98.34. Analysis of the findings based on student department demonstrated that there were significant differences between exclamation point use only in PDR I 1-B class and PDR II 1-B class and analysis of the findings based on gender demonstrated that there was a significant difference favoring female students in the use of quotation marks.