Punctuation

Highway to Success, Charles Dube
PUNCTUATION together with spelling and grammar are critical areas for learners to master if they are to bag those important extra marks in the English Language examination. On top of this, they all help in making the learner’s written work make sense. With all this importance attached to these parts it is surprising that most of us take them for granted. We feel we are pretty knowledgeable to using for example, capital letters.

Learners feel like skipping a page dealing with capital letters when reading yet there is more to them than they think. Go over the information given here, starting from capital letters and you will prove how useful it is. Remember even if a subject does not award marks for punctuation, it is really important to be able to use spelling, punctuation and grammar correctly. Use capital letters at the start of sentences. Every sentence starts with a capital letter.

Examples: She went to hospital today. Jane was late for work yesterday. Both of these sentences need capital letters at the beginning. I am leaving this place tomorrow, because I am due for a medical check-up the next day. “I” has a capital letter wherever you use it. Some words start with a capital letter, even in the middle of a sentence: People’s names and titles: He read the King James version of the Bible.

Names of organisations: World Vision, Zimbabwe Broadcasting Services. Titles of books and plays: Grammar and Composition Handbook. Lord of the Flies — short words like “of” “the” and “upon” do not have capital letters. Towns and names of places: Bulawayo, Mbembesi. Countries, nationalities, and languages: He is English. He comes from England. He speaks English. Religions, the names of gods and religious believers. Christianity is a religion. Christians worship God.

Names of days and months: Monday, Thursday, April, May and June. Public holidays and religious days are also capitalised: Christmas, Easter, and Diwali. Some nouns are capitalised sometimes but not at other times. For example, if you are talking about kings in general, you do not need a capital letter, but if you are talking about a particular king you need a capital letter.

For example, King Lobengula was king of the Ndebele people.

There is another area of concern nowadays where learners have taken the use of the full stop for granted. Learners just end sentences anyhow yet there is punctuation meant to be used to finish sentences correctly. Full stops end sentences. Each sentence ends with a full stop and that should be strictly done. We have learners these days who do not use full stops at the end of sentences. In situations where such negligence is penalised the learners might lose a lot of marks. Learners should know the difference between multiple choice examinations and where they are expected to write full sentences with proper punctuation expected.

Question marks show the end of a question. They show that you are asking a question. When are you writing your final examination paper? Note though, that some sentences tell you about a question but do not actually ask one. The teacher asks Peter why he is late. This is not actually asking a question, so there is no question mark. It is a statement about what the teacher does — it just needs a full stop.

Exclamation marks are used to show strong emotions or to emphasise something. Do not use exclamation marks too often as they will lose their impact. Commas generally separate items in a list. A list that does not contain commas is really hard to understand. Add a comma after each item to make your list clear. Put “and” or “or” between the last two items in the list.

Remember, you do not need to use a comma before the final “and” or “or”. You only need to use commas in lists of three or more items. She went to the market to buy tomatoes, onion, carrots and lettuce. Use commas to separate two adjectives next to others which could be separated by “and”. Example — She was a hard-hearted, ruthless sister. We could put “and” here so we need a comma.

Use of colons and semicolons — These are used when introducing lists or joining sentences. A colon can be used to show that what follows gives more information. This can sometimes take the form of a list: These are the main themes of the novel: loneliness, prejudice, dreams and death. Semicolons separate things in a list. They also break up lists of long phrases. More information will be given on the colons and semicolons.

The above-mentioned will be dealt with together with brackets, hyphens and apostrophes. The latter is tricky and many learners have lost valuable marks because they failed to use the apostrophe correctly.

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