Capital letters and full stops
English · Key Stage 1 · The School
A sentence is a complete idea
A sentence tells you one complete thing: "The cat sat on the mat." It starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop. Without them, writing runs together and readers get lost.
Capitals have three jobs
Capitals start sentences. Capitals begin names of people, places and days — Aisha, London, Friday. And the word I is always written as a capital when it stands on its own: "My friend and I played football together."
Questions get a different ending
If a sentence asks something, it ends with a question mark instead of a full stop: "Where is my hat?" The capital letter at the start stays exactly the same — only the ending changes, to show the reader a question is being asked.
Fixing a sentence that has gone wrong
Here is a sentence with three mistakes: "my friend Amir and i went to leeds on saturday". Find them by checking one job at a time. Does it start with a capital? No — "my" needs a capital M. Is the word I a capital? No. Do the names have capitals? Amir does, but "leeds" and "saturday" do not, and both are names — a place and a day. Fixed: "My friend Amir and I went to Leeds on Saturday." Checking in that order, every time, catches almost everything. One more ending to know: an exclamation mark shows strong feeling — "What a goal!" — but one is plenty. A row of them does not make the feeling stronger.