Punctuation · KS3 English

Sentence punctuation

Every sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Proper nouns and "I" always have capitals.
Don't join two sentences with just a comma (a comma splice). Use a full stop, a conjunction or a semicolon instead.

Use commas to separate items in a list, after a fronted adverbial ("Later that day, …"), after a subordinate clause at the start ("When it rained, we went inside") and around extra information ("My sister, who is ten, loves art").

Apostrophes show missing letters (omission): don't = do not, it's = it is, they're = they are.
They also show belonging (possession): the dog's bone (one dog), the dogs' bones (several dogs), the children's toys (a plural that doesn't end in s).
"Its" (belonging to it) has no apostrophe.

Speech marks go around the words spoken, with the punctuation inside: "Come here," she said.
A colon introduces a list or an explanation. A semicolon joins two closely related main clauses.
Brackets and pairs of dashes add extra information. Hyphens join words: well-known.
Watch homophones: there, their and they're; your and you're; to, too and two.

Full stop: Ends a sentence that is a statement.
Comma splice: Two sentences wrongly joined with only a comma.
Apostrophe of omission: Shows where letters are missing, as in "don't".
Apostrophe of possession: Shows that something belongs to someone, as in "Sam's bag".
Speech marks: Show the exact words someone says.
Colon: Introduces a list or an explanation.
Semicolon: Joins two closely related main clauses.
Brackets: Add extra information to a sentence.
Hyphen: Joins two words together, as in "well-known".
Homophones: Words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings.