Punctuation and Spelling

Spelling, punctuation and grammar are all important. Nothing will turn off a reader faster than bad spelling and incorrect punctuation. If your goal is to encourage your readers to continue reading, you must pay attention to these basics.

When assessing undergraduates' work, lecturers and tutors do not explicitly deduct a certain number of marks for spelling and punctuation mistakes. However, if your essay is riddled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, it will be difficult to read and you will not have expressed your ideas clearly - this is what you will lose marks for.

In addition, as you leave university and progress into a career, you will almost inevitably be expected to be able to express yourself clearly in writing. Your three years as an undergraduate are an excellent opportunity to improve your writing skills!

One way of helping yourself learn to write better is by reading. Good writers are almost always avid readers. So read. Read lots. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read books, magazines, novels, short stories, poems, newspapers, cornflake packets. The more you read, the better.

There is not scope here to give detailed advice on spelling and punctuation, and I am not a qualified English teacher! However I have provided some brief notes on spelling and the use of the apostrophe and have also suggested some places where there is extra help on these topics. Please e-mail me if there are other punctuation or grammar topics that you think could usefully be covered here.

Spelling

You will already know if you have a problem with spelling or not. It is not something that a web tutorial can give you very much help with. However, here are a few tips to get you started:

1) Invest in a GOOD dictionary, keep it next to you when you are writing and use it.
See if you can identify which types of words you have most difficulty with (I personally find deciding whether a word has double letters in it the most tricky). You might even consider making yourself learn ten words a week for a few weeks as though you were back in primary class.

2) DO NOT rely completely on the spell-checker in the word processing package - although these are a great help.
The spellchecker on your computer can only tell you if something uses non-standard spelling. It can't tell you if a word is used incorrectly, or is mistyped so that it becomes another word. An obvious example of this is 'form' and 'from', but I have also seen the word 'pubic' in the title of a published journal article, when the authors had clearly intended the word 'public'!

3) PROOF READ! Go over everything you have written.
Make sure that you complete an essay well before the deadline, so that you can take a couple of days' break from it, and then read it through to check for errors. Alternatively, ask a friend to read it for you and offer to proof read their work. It is quite difficult to check something immediately after you have written it, because you know what you wanted it to say and it is hard to make yourself read what is actually down on paper.

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The apostrophe

The apostrophe ( ' ) is a punctuation mark used to show possession. It is also used in contractions, which should generally be avoided in formal prose such as essay writing.

possession example:
"That was Peter's favourite coffee mug."

contraction example:
"You shouldn't have dropped it."

In the following sentence you can see how the apostrophe is used twice to show possession, however, in this example the objects that are possessed are more abstract than the example of Peter's coffee mug above.

Sociologists' new interest in childhood has emphasized children's agency in the outside world, as well as inside families and other adult-dominated institutions.

In this example the rather abstract concept of 'new interest' belongs to Sociologists and 'agency' belongs to children.

The one slight complication, or exception, when using the apostrophe to indicate possession is when using the pronoun 'it'. In the following example 'its' does not have an apostrophe even though the implication is that the day is the possession of the pound. Another way to remember this is that "its" is being used here as a possessive adjective like, "my", "your", "his" etc. None of these words has an apostrophe, so neither should "its".

If Britain moves over to using the Euro, the pound will have had its day

The rule is that 'it's' only has an apostrophe when used as a contraction for 'it is'. For example;

It's clear that the increase in women's employment will have a significant effect on the family.

However, ideally you should avoid using 'it's' in essays so that the above sentence would begin

It is clear that…

A common mistake is to use the apostrophe even when the word is simply a plural, and there is no hint of possession or contraction. Perhaps the most frequent mistake on this module is using the apostrophe when talking about decades (e.g. the 1960s, 1970s, or the 1940s).
Please note that the apostrophe should not be used in these cases unless it is being used to indicate possession. Here are some examples to demonstrate what I mean.

During the 1960s the divorce rate began to rise dramatically.
Since the 1970s the number of couples cohabiting has increased.
Equal opportunities legislation, passed in the mid 1970s, has still not resulted in women earning the same as men.

But…

The 1970s' equal-opportunities legislation has had a limited effect on women's pay.

In this last example we need the apostrophe because the equal opportunities legislation belongs to the 1970s, i.e. we are indicating possession.

It is also important to get the position of the apostrophe correct depending upon whether the possessor is singular or plural. For example in the sentence "The accident happened because the cars' brakes failed" the implication is that there were at least two cars and that both their sets of brakes failed.

For further details on grammar & punctuation, follow the link below

Temple University Writing Centre
http://www.temple.edu/writingctr/cweb5030.htm