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Kids
Friendly New Zealand
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Children's Writing Club
Other writing tips
About our writing competition for children
Question marks and other stuff like that
There are many different punctuation symbols you can use in your
writing. Here we cover a couple that you have probably already
used, the question mark and the exclamation mark.
Question Mark
What does a question mark look like?
?
Why
do we use a question mark?
We use a question mark to tell people who are reading our story
that we have asked a question and are looking for an answer.
When you read the two sentences in red above, did you realise
that they were asking you questions?
Exclamation mark |
What
does an exclamation mark look like?
!
Why
do we use an exclamation mark?
When we use an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, it is
like shouting to someone rather than using our normal voice. It
makes the person reading our story take notice, it says to them
they should make the sentence sound loud. If we don't put an
exclamation mark at the end of a sentence it reads as if someone
is just making a statement, like the example below.
Example:
Tom said to Sally, "That’s my book."
But if we put an exclamation mark at the end of the word book,
instead of a full stop, you could imagine Tom is upset Sally has
his book.
Example:
Tom said to Sally, "That’s my book!"
Are there other types of punctuation?
Yes, there are a few more. Talk to your parents or teacher about
different types of punctuation and when you would use them. The common ones you will see are:
Brackets: These look like this
( )
and always come in pairs. They are used to separate part of a
sentence
Colons: A colon
looks like this
:
and is used before a list.
Semicolons: A
semicolon looks like this
; and makes a bigger break than a
comma.
Speech marks:
Speech marks always come in pairs and look like this
" "
and we use them to tell
our readers someone is talking in our story. We put them around
the words the person has said.
Other writing tips
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