Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation
Punctuation and capital letters
Punctuate a sentence with capital letters, end marks, commas and speech marks.
Punctuation is not decoration. It tells a reader where to stop, where to pause, and which words came out of somebody's mouth. Take it away and a page becomes a guessing game.
Capital letters
Two rules cover almost everything. The first word of a sentence gets one, and so does every name — of a person, a place, a day or a month. Ordinary nouns like teacher, table and pencil never do.
Ending a sentence
A statement or an instruction ends in a full stop. A question ends in a question mark. Something shouted or strongly felt ends in an exclamation mark.
Speech marks
Speech marks go around the exact words spoken and nothing else. A comma closes the speech before the reporting words, and those reporting words stay lower case: "I am ready," said Meera.
Worked example
Punctuate: where are the keys asked ravi
Ravi's exact words are "Where are the keys", so those go inside the speech marks.
Only the spoken words belong between the marks.
Try it together
Repair a line, one decision at a time.
The line as it stands is: my brother visited the museum in march
1.Two words in that line need a capital letter. One of them is the first word. Write the other one.
Have a go
Which sentence is punctuated correctly?
Ready to practise?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.