It has taken me awhile to figure something out, but I think I finally did it. But I want to make sure, so please help me.
I really first encountered this when I came to China to teach. The Chinese teachers I work with did not use capital letters or ending punctuation. When I study on LiveMocha, very few learners there use punctuation either. Then I found English Club, and guess what? Many learners here don't use punctuation either. Until now, I haven't been able to figure out why.
I'm sure they have been taught correctly, I thought to myself. But if they were taught correctly, why aren't they using it correctly? It was last week, when one of my 5th grade students was writing on the board, that I started to put two and two together.
He wrote: the weather in june is sunny and warm
I whispered in his ear, so as not to embarrass him in front of the class, to fix the errors.
He said, "Oh, I forgot. We don't have captials in Chinese." (Out of the mouth's of babes).
And they don't!
Then in the chatroom the other day someone wrote in Arabic I think it was. I got to wondering if they have capital letters? And what about other languages? I got to thinking, maybe they are just forgetting because they don't use captial letters in their language.
So, I thought I would write a quick "cheat sheet" for writing in English.
1. The beginning letter of each sentence should be a capital letter.
2. Each sentence should end with a period (.).
3. Each question should end with a question mark (?).
4. The beginning letter of people's names should begin with a capital letter.
Pretty simple really and it will make your writing look so much nicer.
I hope no one will get mad at me for writing this. I know many of you are studying for the IELTS and thought this might help. Please let me know if I might be correct in my "assumption".
Comments
Hello Vanessa,
Thanks for sharing such a nice blog. And you are right there is no capital letters in Arabic.
Thank you Vanes for reminding us. We'll definitely follow as u said. And we need Teachers like you, to give us some blow whenever we go wrong.
After all, we are here in EC for learning and improving our skills. So we require your guidance, support and corrections always.
I appreciate your blog on this issue.
Thanks dear Vanessa ,,I do not think so ,we never be mad at you :)" i like to some one tell me about my mistake and you know we do not have capital letters ,that is why i sometimes forget this :)"
so I think i finally get it too :)"
Thanks Noa, I really appreciate you and what you said. Thanks also for the beautiful picture.
Awww .. Vanessa .. please don't retract this blog. I really appreciate your blog. Sometimes, I do tend to forget that what ever I write in the chat room, some learners are observing, and I'm giving a bad example to some of them. You'll not lose your friends over this, in fact, I think you'll gain more friends, and friends that you have now (case example : me) would really appreciate it.
Noa...do what you want to do. I was not trying to find fault with anyone. I was just trying to figure out why things are they way they seem to be. That's all. Maybe I should retrack the blog. I don't want to lose my friends over this.
Hehehe.. Vanessa .. I must admit that I seldom use "Capital" letters while chatting. It's my bad habit. But while writing comments or blogs, I do observe all those rules; capital letters, punctuation and such. Thank you for reminding me to observe them while chatting too. I'll try my best.
Dear Van, I am now learning punctuation, I find it powerful in writing. You are right, we tend to forget the captials because we don't have them in Chinese. As for English punctuations, I think they are so different from ours. I often use the wrong ones, or forget them. Thanks for Tim's continuous reminding, I come to notice the importance of the punctuations. Now I hope to learn more. I am not sure if others have been taught punctuation's usage, I can say, my teacher didn't teach me the usage of English punctuations.
So Van, do you have any nice ideas or useful materials for help me learning punctuation?
Thanks for sharing such a nice and helpful blog. Have a great day, dear Van!
But in English if we dosn't use these punctuation marks, some time meaning of the sentence has been changed.
Now a day I notice teacher Anele has correcting grammatical mistakes of thier friends, I'm very thankful, if anybody correct my mistakes especialy Teacher Anele and Teacher Vanessa.
Great!
Anyway, we are learning English not other languages, so we should capitalize the letter which should be capitalized in English.