Common Mistakes

Use commas when you want to add extra information to your sentence that has a natural direct connection to it.

• My youngest child, Peter, is 15 years old this year.


Use brackets () when the information is unimportant but may help some readers.

• The car was travelling at 60 kilometres (approximately 37 miles) per hour.

Use commas when adding extra information.

Don’t use quotation marks ('') when nothing is being quoted. If you want to highlight a specific part of the text, use italics.

• Any orders ‘over £500’ will receive a 10% discount.
• Any orders over £500 will receive a 10% discount.
• The dog was barking all day.

Try these tests & exercises to help your writing.

A question needs an answer and a question mark at the end. A request doesn’t need an answer, so it isn’t a question. Don’t use question marks for requests.

Decide if you want or need an answer.

Compare:

• Can you please give me five copies of this article. (request)
• Did you write this article? (Question, so I need an answer.)
• Would you kindly fill out this application form.
• Do you have any application forms?

Now do the exercise.

To check if you need an apostrophe (') do this:

Example 2
1. The original sentence.
• Ten weeks old.
2. Now write it with of.
• Old of ten weeks.
3. That doesn't work.
4. So, we don’t use an apostrophe.
• Ten weeks old.

When to use apostrophes.