|
Commas and apostrophes
You might think that commas and apostrophes aren't important,
but you would be wrong!
Did you notice our
comma and apostrophe in the sentence above? So what is a comma
and what is an apostrophe and why do we need to use them?
What does a comma look like? A comma looks like this
,. It‘s like a full stop
with a tail. When you write it in your sentence it goes on the
bottom of the line, with its tail hanging down – a bit like the
tail of the letter y.
What does an apostrophe look like?
An apostrophe looks
like this
' It looks a bit
like a comma except it goes up at the top of the line.
So why do we need to use commas and apostrophes in our
sentences?
Commas
There's this cool
book by Lynne Truss called ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, which is
all about punctuation. On the back cover of the book it has a
little explanation about the title on the front cover, and goes
like this:
A
panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then
draws a gun and fires two shots in the air and walks out. When the panda was asked
why he had shot his gun, he explained that he was just doing
what it said in the wildlife manual:
Panda. Large bear-like mammal that eats, shoots and leaves.
The words shoots
and leaves have two meanings:
· First
meaning: A plant has shoots (new growth) and leaves.
· Second
meaning: Someone shoots with a gun and leaves a place.
Because someone had
put a comma between the words eats and shoots, it changed the
whole meaning of the sentence.
Let’s look at how
it should have been written, without the comma.
Panda. Large bear-like mammal that eats shoots and leaves.
So when someone put
the comma between the words eats and shoots, the whole sentence
changed. Instead of meaning an animal that eats the shoots and
leaves of plants, the meaning changed to mean an animal that
first eats, then shoots (with a gun) and then leaves the place
where he was. So you can see how a little thing like a comma can
make a big difference to a sentence.
So
what do commas do?
1. They
divide words in a list.
This makes
it easier for us to read what the boy put in the basket in the
example
below. Can
you find the commas?
Example:
The boy put apples, pears,
oranges and bananas into his basket.
Sometimes a
list can read kind of funny if you don’t put a comma in after
each item on the list.
Look at the
example below.
Example: The boy put
apples and pears three balls of string a jar of frogs stones and
some sticks in his basket.
It just
doesn't read well or sound right does it? Let’s read it again
with the commas put in.
Example: The boy put
apples and pears, three balls of string, a jar of frogs, stones
and some sticks in his
basket.
The whole
sentence makes sense now, although I don't think I would like to
be his mum getting that basket!
2. They help
join two sentences together.
Sometimes
sentences read better when they are put together, so we use a
comma here to join
them. This
is rather tricky but an easy way is to remember that the two
sentences could be
joined with
the word 'and' or 'or' instead. You can only put a comma
in when the next sentence starts with words
like then or
so. Look at the examples
below to see
what I mean.
Example: The boy put
heaps into his basket. Then he walked home. (Two sentences)
Example: The boy put
heaps into his basket and then he walked home. (One sentence
joined by and)
Example: The boy put
heaps into his basket, then he walked home. (One sentence joined
by a comma before
the word
then)
The other
way I think about commas is that they allow me to take a little
breath
before I
start talking again. When you saw the comma between the words
'basket' and 'then',
didn't you
stop and take a breath? Try it again and see if you did.
3. They can
make a sentence more interesting.
I like to use
commas like this, because they let you add words to make a
sentence more interesting. The
sentence must
be a complete sentence without the added words, like the example
below.
Example: The boy had a
heavy basket.
This first
example reads okay, but look at how much more interesting this
sentence is when we add some extra
words. We can
do this by putting a comma at the beginning and the end of the
extra words we want to put in.
Example: The boy, who was
very small, had a heavy basket.
We could take
out the words 'who was very small' and the sentence would still
read okay, but now we know
that the boy
was small and you can imagine him struggling with the heavy
basket.
Apostrophes
1. They show that we’ve joined two words into one shorter word.
Apostrophes make
words sound more like the way we talk every day. When you talk,
how often would you say, "I do not know why he did not go to
class." Mostly you would say, "I don't know why he didn't go to
class." Apostrophes are used when we’ve joined two words
together and taken a letter out to make the two words into one
shorter word, so really an apostrophe stands for the missing
letter/s of a word.
Some common words
we join up and shorten with an apostrophe:
|
Do not |
Don't |
|
Did not |
Didn't |
|
We are |
We're |
|
They are |
They're |
|
It is |
It's |
|
That is |
That's |
Can you see a word
in the examples above that would have a different meaning if we
took the apostrophe out? That's right, we're. If you take the
apostrophe out then it would say were, and have a different
meaning.
We're refers to a
group of us, whereas were means something in the past.
2. They tell us that something belongs to someone.
When we want to
tell our readers that something belongs to someone or something,
we use an apostrophe. Let’s say we want the basket in our above
examples to belong to the boy's mother. Then we would put the
apostrophe after the r in mother and before the s. Look at the
example below.
Example: His mother's
basket was big and heavy.
If we take the
apostrophe out of this sentence as in the next example, all of a
sudden it looks as if the boy has a lot of mothers!
Example: His mothers
basket was big and heavy.
How is it
different? Because the word mothers means more than one mother.
When we put the apostrophe in before the s, it tells us that the
basket belongs to only one mother.
3. They tell us that something belongs to more than one person.
If we put the
apostrophe after the s, it shows the thing belongs to more than
one person.
Example: The mothers’
basket was big and heavy. This means the basket belongs to more
than one mother.
Look at where the
apostrophes are in the next two examples. Can you work out how
many boys share this basket?
Example: The boy’s basket was
big and heavy. (Answer: Only one boy.)
Example: The boys’ basket was
big and heavy. (Answer: More than one boy.)
Other uses for commas and apostrophes
There are other ways to use commas and apostrophes, but the
examples above are the ones you are most likely to use as you
learn to write. Your teachers or parents will help you
with the more complicated uses of these two types of
punctuation, but you can practise getting these ones right to
start with.
Other writing tips
|
