A novel PAPR shaping technique intended for systems with high spectral efficiency and single carrier transmission is presented. This technique applies puncturing of error correction redundancy bits to achieve a desired Markovian symbol transmission probability distribution, which avoids symbol sequences with high peak values. For a 16-QAM system with transmission rate of 3 bit/symbol and a root raised cosine (RRC) pulse shape filter with roll-off factor 0.1 and duration of six symbols, an overall gain of about 2.2 dB is demonstrated by simulations using pragmatic binary turbo code for error correction. The technique can be used to improve any single carrier communication link limited by the high power amplifier (HPA) peak power.