Orders National Democrats to enter punctuation marks (8)
I believe the answer is:
commands
'orders' is the definition.
(commanding is a kind of ordering)
'national democrats to enter punctuation marks' is the wordplay.
'national democrats' becomes 'nd' (this might be a standard abbreviation of which I'm unaware).
'to enter' indicates putting letters inside.
'punctuation marks' becomes 'commas' (comma is a kind of punctuation mark).
'nd' placed inside 'commas' is 'COMMANDS'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for commands that I've seen before include "Orders" , "Major divisions of Irish army" .)