I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)
The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”
If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:
Wikipedia on the ampersand
Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!
A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon
Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com
And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.
Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.
The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.