What is it for?
As already stated, this is not an English course. The purpose of the course is to make you into a proofreader who can give assurances of quality to clients, other departments or superiors, so that they can be confident that possibly the last pair of eyes scanning their output had their best interests at heart. Your being able to deliver on that assurance requires a full understanding of the nuts and bolts of language, and if we say that grammar is the nuts, then punctuation is surely the bolts.
Punctuation has a hard time these days. There are those who would rather do without it and those who use it too much, both of whom create confusion as to its proper use. "Proper" – now there's a contentious word. After all, who decides what is "proper English"? Whereas some would assume that the answer lies in some dusty volume of written English in the British Library, others would suggest that since more people speak and write in US English than British, the former should be the standard. Indeed, the major university presses of Great Britain generally opt for US English in their academic work.
Such differences are, we could say, academic.
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