Grammar and punctuation guides

What rules you definitely need to know

In order to get as many of these marks as possible, there are certain key accuracy areas that you need to master, and some of them are quite difficult. Where to put commas is particularly tricky, for instance. But it’s not the tricky rules that will lose you lots of marks in an exam. It’s getting the basic ones wrong that will really hurt your accuracy mark, so it’s these ones that you absolutely must grasp. The trickier ones are something you should strive for too — you should always strive for excellence — but focus on the basic ones first.

The basic rules you absolutely must learn are:

1. What a sentence is – when one starts and ends (called sentence demarcation)

2. When to use capital letters: at the start of sentences, for proper nouns and when using the pronoun ‘I’

3. How to use apostrophes for contraction and possession – including it’s vs. its

4. The difference between homophones like their/there/they’re and you’re/your

5. Not writing one word when you mean two – e.g. in fact (not infact), a lot (not alot), etc

6. How to use tense correctly

7. How to punctuate direct speech

There are guides for each of these things on the website, so you just need to go through them and take the time to really learn the rules. It’s not a quick job, especially if you don’t know any of these rules right now, but everyone can do it, including you. You just have to want it.

If you want to get the very top grades (and you should) then you should also focus on:

1. How to use commas

2. How to use semi-colons

3. How to use dashes

4. How to use more complex sentence structures