Using Punctuation in Task 1

In this lecture we’re going to look at punctuation as punctuation accurate punctuation is an important element of scoring a band seven indie band descriptors. So have a look particularly at three common tasks one errors related to punctuation and how we can resolve and avoid these errors. So the first error that I want to look at is with capital letters. This is one of the most common areas that I see and task on responses. Have a look at the graph on the right here. We’ve seen it before. So in the graph we can see that all the categories are capitalized running basketball swimming football soccer. These are all capitalized. However does that mean that we should capitalize these categories in the response. No it does not mean that we should capitalize the categories when writing our response. The figures of four football with a capital F fluctuate between. This is wrong. We should not use this. It should be a little F for football just as it would be as a regular noun. Now if we’re discussing categories with what are called proper nouns like cities or countries or dates like months or day of the day of the week. Names geographical landmarks then the capitalization rule still applies. If you would use the capital letter to begin that noun anyway then do so in your response. So here you can see we have the UK and Australia and we have the months proper nouns countries and proper nouns in the month as well. So as usual we will continue to capitalize these countries including adjectives. Australia bought almost 2500 AC units in April whereas the British only bought 500 so we would capitalize these if we were writing anyway and we will capitalize them in their response but do not assume that just because something has a capital letter in the chart that means that we should write in our response. Now the second area that I want to focus on is missing commas. These are very very common in Task responses. Have a look at this chart on the left the stacked bar chart that we’ve looked up for. Now look at the sentences that are about to come up on your screen and see if you can identify the comma mistakes. It might help if I read them as well. Overall the majority of students are aged between 18 and 43 whereas older students make up the minority history which is the most equal distribution of students the tracks around 80 18 to 30 year olds. There are almost as many 31 to 43 year old to take literature as 18 to 30 year olds with figures of 110 and 90 respectively. So where are the missing commas here. See if you can work that out. And then you can press play to find out if you are right. OK have a look. Now this time I’m going to read the sentences again and I’m going to pause where the commas are to show how much more natural and fluid that sounds when we use commas because really we use commas as like a mental pause of course we’re not saying these things out loud but we can take a mental pause in our head when they come up just as we would when we’re speaking and we give an audible pause. So overall the majority of students are aged between 18 and 43 whereas older students make up the minority group to come as in their history which sees the most equal distribution of students at tracks who are around 80 18 to 30 year olds. And finally there are almost as many 31 to 43 year old to take literature as 18 to 30 year olds with figures of 110 and 90 respectively. Now each of these commers is being used for a different purpose. They might use be using a cohesive device like overrule they might be used for a complex sentence like before whereas we might be using them as a non defining relative clause like in the second example that each of them is very very important and should be included in order to make sure we are addressing the requirement for accurate punctuation the final error. I want to think about is apostrophe’s is a quite commonly confused as well. So this is most frequent when discussing places such as cities or countries. Have a look at this chart on the right hand side here we’re looking at fruit imports in 2011 in four different countries looking at four different kinds of fruit with an other category in there as well. So here is an example of an accurate sentence without any apostrophe’s imports of apples in Denmark amounted to around 55000 kilograms. Three times as many as in Sweden. There’s no need for any apostrophe’s in here. Everything works fine. But look at the second sentence here. This one does use apostrophe’s uses them appropriately. In 2011 Denmarks figure for imported apples was 55000 kilograms around three times higher than that of Swedens. Now this is fine. Again this is absolutely fine. So the issues here arise when either the apostrophe is missing when it should be there or an apostrophe is used when it is unnecessary when it should not be used. So have a look at this the figures for both of Iceland’s onno ways were both 30000 kilograms in 2011 that is a typical mistake that you might see. So the figures for both Iceland and Norway. And what about when apostrophe’s are missing or here. This is an example Iceland and Norway banana imports amounted to 30000 kilograms each. No these should be looked at possessively Iceland’s. And Norway’s banana imports amounted to thirty thousand kilograms each. So in summary do be careful around those three particular punctuation features capital letters commas and apostrophes.