English Second Language·Punctuation & spelling · NSSCO 3.2
Capital letters & the apostrophe
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Two tiny marks, one big difference to your writing. In this lesson Miss Veronica shows you exactly when a word earns a capital letter — the start of a sentence, the word 'I', and every proper noun like Namibia, Windhoek and Monday. Then we tame the apostrophe and its two jobs: squashing words into contractions (do not → don't) and showing that something belongs to someone (Tangeni's book). We finish with the traps that catch everyone — its versus it's — and the golden rule that an apostrophe never, ever makes a plural.
What you'll learn in this lesson
By the end you should be able to (NSSCO English Second Language 3.2):
- Use a capital letter for the first word of a sentence and for the pronoun 'I'
- Identify proper nouns and give them a capital letter — people's names, places, countries, days, months, holidays, languages, nationalities and titles
- Explain why seasons and ordinary common nouns do not take a capital letter
- Use a capital letter for the first word of direct speech and for the main words in book and film titles
- Use the apostrophe to form contractions, placing it exactly where letters are missing
- Use the apostrophe to show possession for singular, plural and irregular-plural nouns
- Choose correctly between its/it's, your/you're and whose/who's
- Explain that an apostrophe is never used to make a word plural
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