🏁 Make sure you use capital letters for the names of people, places, businesses, events, and so on.
Here are a few examples of names that need capital letters:
Billie Eilish, Aston Martin, Lionel Messi, Mohamed Salah, Manchester United, MUFC, Buckingham Palace, MS Office, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram.
📲 💻You can use this link to a Google Form so you can test you’ve got it.
🔆 Sorted? Then go to Skill 7!
🛠 Need some written practise? Read on.
🎯 📝 Here is a quick exercise to help you. Rewrite this piece of text to show yourself that you understand using capitals for names (there are 24 to find, so count them up when you think you’re done!):
A few years ago, jose mourinho was the manager of manchester united, often just called mufc, who in the past have been one of the best teams in the uk premier league. The team had some good players, like paul pogba, and in the past there were some other famous players, like david beckham, ryan giggs and george best. The women’s team was once captained by alex greenwood and fran bentley played in goal.
✅ The text above should look like this, so if you got all 24 you’re ready to move on:
A few years ago, Jose Mourinho was the manager of Manchester United, often just called MUFC, who in the past have been one of the best teams in the UK Premier League. The team had some good players, like Paul Pogba, and in the past there were some other famous players, like David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and George Best. The women’s team was once captained by Alex Greenwood and Fran Bentley played in goal.
🚦Time for more?
Because we text and write a lot more informally on social media, it’s easy to forget that, in more formal writing, capitals are used quite a lot in English.
Each word in your address also needs one, as does each letter of a UK postcode, eg
12 Hilldown Avenue
Sheldon
Brighton
BN14 6YT
🎯 💻 Want to try another test? There’s a quiz on capital letters here, which gives you marks as you go along:
https://www.esolcourses.com/content/lifeintheuk/liverpool/punctuation-quiz.html
There are more online exercises if you need to sharpen this skill at the end of the next section, which also helps you add capital letters to the start of sentences. Then you’ll be ready to use them wherever you need to.
🎓 The real term for names that need capital letters is proper nouns. In the text above, the word ‘manager’ doesn’t need one because it’s just an ordinary name for something, called a common noun.