Mar­lene Davis

The spellcheck on your com­put­er will help you most of the time, but there are at least four oc­ca­sions when it will not pro­vide any as­sis­tance:

1. When you ne­glect to use the spell check af­ter you have fin­ished writ­ing a doc­u­ment;

2. When you re­al­ly do not know the cor­rect spelling of a name or a word. This is where your dic­tio­nary or some oth­er form of re­search will help you;

3. When you con­fuse the homonyms, eg, it's and its;

4. When you do not know the dif­fer­ence be­tween the Stan­dard Eng­lish and the Amer­i­can spelling. Since most of us in for­mer British ter­ri­to­ries are us­ing Stan­dard Eng­lish spelling, the fol­low­ing fam­i­lies of words will help you to dis­tin­guish be­tween them. Re­mem­ber that your com­put­er has been set in de­fault Amer­i­can spelling, so you must, be­fore be­gin­ning to write, go to Tools, and click on Set Lan­guage, then Eng­lish, then set Eng­lish, UK or T&T.

Tips on punc­tu­a­tion

Read the fol­low­ing two sen­tences and see the change that punc­tu­a­tion makes to them.

(a) That man said my boss should re­tire.

(b) "That man", said my boss, "should re­tire."

The words are iden­ti­cal, but what a dif­fer­ence the punc­tu­a­tion makes to the mean­ing!

I can­not stress enough how im­por­tant punc­tu­a­tion is to writ­ten ex­pres­sion. I have had long ex­pe­ri­ence in read­ing and cor­rect­ing es­says and let­ters and I have found that if the punc­tu­a­tion is miss­ing or "care­less," I can­not un­der­stand the mean­ing of what is writ­ten and have of­ten had to re-read, with mount­ing an­noy­ance, to get the gist of the writer's in­ten­tions. I am sure it must cost ex­am­i­na­tion can­di­dates un­told num­ber of marks for ne­glect­ing the rudi­ments of punc­tu­a­tion. In the busi­ness world, too, it must be an oc­cu­pa­tion­al haz­ard.

There are 12 punc­tu­a­tion marks in gen­er­al use, but the main ones which I shall deal with here are: the full stop, the com­ma, the apos­tro­phe, the ques­tion mark.

The full stop has two prin­ci­pal us­es:

1. To sig­ni­fy the end of a sen­tence. This is where some writ­ers, in­cor­rect­ly, place com­mas and pro­ceed as if they have writ­ten sen­tences. A use­ful mot­to is: When in doubt, fin­ish the sen­tence and start an­oth­er.

2. To in­di­cate that a word has been ab­bre­vi­at­ed: Mr. Mrs. Dr. St. i.e. e.g. etc.

The com­ma is used with­in sen­tences to in­di­cate a pause be­tween sense-groups of words:

�2 af­ter a mod­i­fi­er to the main state­ment: Reach­ing the cor­ner, he crossed the street.

�2 to sep­a­rate words or phras­es in a list: The draw­er con­tained pens, pen­cils and pa­per.

�2 to en­large an idea be­tween sub­ject and verb: The an­swer, which was quite un­ex­pect­ed, took them by sur­prise.

�2 as a gen­er­al rule, com­mas are not need­ed be­fore con­junc­tions e.g. and or but.

�2 Com­mas are used to in­di­cate a pause be­fore or af­ter cer­tain words: How­ev­er, fi­nal­ly.

It is not ad­vis­able, how­ev­er, to overuse com­mas. They should be used spar­ing­ly to as­sist rather than to im­pede the read­er's un­der­stand­ing of what is writ­ten.

The apos­tro­phe has two ma­jor us­es.

1. The first de­notes pos­ses­sion. The sec­re­tary's (sin­gu­lar) note­book. The sec­re­taries' (plur­al) note­books.

2. The oth­er use is to in­di­cate that a let­ter (or let­ters) has/have been omit­ted from a word which has been con­tract­ed:

Do not...don't it is...it's tele­phone...'phone

The ques­tion mark is ob­vi­ous­ly placed at the end of di­rect ques­tions.

How many did you buy? When will he leave for his hol­i­day in New York? Is it rain­ing?

In­ter­est­ing­ly, how­ev­er, on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent note, our lo­cal par­lance of­ten in­volves mak­ing state­ments which end with a slight in­flec­tion of the voice, in­tend­ing to sound like a query. You fin­ished? You didn't find the mon­ey? You leav­ing now? You com­ing back be­fore dark? But that's a whole oth­er sto­ry for an­oth­er day.

AMER­I­CAN SPELLING STAN­DARD ENG­LISH SPELLING

or­ga­nize/ or­ga­ni­za­tion or­gan­ise/ or­gan­i­sa­tion

cen­ter / me­ter cen­tre/ me­tre

trav­eled, can­celed trav­elled, can­celled

pro­gram/ madam pro­gramme/ madame

li­cense li­cence (noun)/ li­cense (verb)

prac­tise prac­tice (noun)/ prac­tise (verb)

check cheque

col­or, la­bor, hon­or colour, labour, ho­n­our

trans­porta­tion trans­port

method­ol­o­gy method

con­di­tion­al­i­ty con­di­tion

got­ten/ proven got/ proved

When deal­ing with Amer­i­can busi­ness­es or uni­ver­si­ties, etc, you would be well ad­vised to use Amer­i­can spelling. Of course, when you are in the USA, you would be ad­vised to do the same, eg, when you want a cheque, you had bet­ter write check, if you want your mon­ey.