Punctuation

I will add to this post as we cover different forms of punctuation each week.

Notes for doing the 11+ style punctuation questions: look for pairs of punctuation: brackets, commas, speech marks, dashes - they will often miss one out. Check across line breaks - especially for full stops and capital letters. Don't forget, it will be unlikely to have more than 2 with no mistake - look carefully if you get lots of option E!

• Full stops and capital letters.

These mark sentences. Do check that both the chunk before the full stop makes

sense - as well as the chunk after it!

Capital letters are also for proper nouns - one of a kind! If you say a/the before it,

generally that a common noun and does not need a capital. One tricky example is

'dad' - if you are talkign about 'my dad' - that is geenral, but if you use it as his name,

it is a proper noun e.g. Dad, please can I have ...?

• Commas - for a list, to separate clauses, to add extra information in (these will be in pairs)

• Apostrophes - use if a word has been shortened to show where the letters are missing e.g. I'm (I am) or to show if something belongs to someone (test: if you can say the .... of .....) e.g. the boy's pencil or the cats' whiskers (one boy, many cats). DO NOT use apostrophes for plurals, or in possessive pronouns as these already show possession - that is their job e.g. his, her, its, ours, theirs.

• Speech marks