为追求文章层次鲜明，中学生写作时绞尽脑汁使用各种各样的连接词，结果给人以为了连接而连接的生硬感，自然流畅无从谈起。其实只要我们多关注一下雅思阅读复习资料中的文章，或者多关注一下老外的作文，就会发现很多标点符号的作用相当于、甚至优于连接词，可以让文章浑然一体，自然流畅。我们来看几个例子：
1、冒号、破折号——举例、解释说明
* Action is being taken along several fronts: through new legislation, improved enforcement and innovative technology.
不难看出，这里冒号的作用就相当于举例连接词 “such as”，后面的信息解释了“several fronts”有哪些，所以这里冒号起到了引导“举例+解释说明”的信息的双重作用。类似的例子还有：
* The work was immense: filling about eighty large notebooks (and without a library to hand), Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, and illustrated their many meanings with some 114,000 quotations drawn from English writing on every subject, from the Elizabethans to his own time.
这个句子中冒号=for instance, for example…等连接句子的举例连接词，后面的数字信息解释说明了工作“immense”的程度。
学以致用：
&. Countries like the USA and Australia are modern multicultral societies; they have been created by successive waves of immigration of people from other continents and countries, as well as by the original inhabitants: Europe, Africa, Asia and Central and South America over hundreds of years.(引自范文Andrew Malcolm)
& But you have to think about another aspect of the problem: a punishement is also useful to impress people, to make them fear the law.（引自剑桥全真题范文）
& Here too, men enjoyed more leisure time ---over eighty hours, compared with seventy hours for women, perhaps once again reflecting the fact that women spend more time working in the home than men.
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