🏁 Always end normal sentences with a full stop. It makes your writing much easier for everyone to read.
If you don’t, your work will look like this:
I went to college then I came home after that I went online for a bit and then had dinner.
Confusing, isn’t it? It should look like this:
I went to college. Then I came home. After that I went online for a bit and then had dinner.
📲 💻You can use this link to a Google Form so you can test you’ve got it.
🔆Do you see how using full stops at the right time makes your writing so much easier to read? If you’re sorted now, go to Skill 9!
🛠 Need more practise? Try these written exercises below.
🎯 📝 Here is a quick one to help you- just rewrite the text with all 8 full stops in it where they should be:
Messi started his run from inside the Athletic Bilbao half Then he tackled four defenders He cut inside quickly The ball shot into the bottom corner of the net The goalkeeper was helpless Messi also scored another one later on Thanks to him, Barcelona had won again He is really one of the greatest players ever
⬇️ Answers below.
If you got them all right, you should now be ready to combine both of the skills you need for sentences- capital letters at the start and full stops at the end.
🎯 📝 Here is an exercise that tests you to put both capital letters (15 to find) and full stops (8) back in:
laura Trott is Britain’s best female athlete ever at the Brazil Olympics she won four gold medals in cycling this is more than any other female athlete before her she is going to marry Jason Kenny he won six gold medals they are the most successful Olympic couple ever with 10 gold medals between them laura hopes to have children one day she is an example to girls everywhere of what they can achieve
⬇️ Answers below.
✅ Here’s the set of corrections to the Messi text above:
Messi started his run from inside the Athletic Bilbao half. Then he tackled four defenders. He cut inside quickly. The ball shot into the bottom corner of the net. The goalkeeper was helpless. Messi also scored another one later on. Thanks to him, Barcelona had won again. He is really one of the greatest players ever.
✅ Here are the corrections to the Trott text above:
Laura Trott is Britain’s best female athlete ever. At the Brazil Olympics she won four gold medals in cycling. This is more than any other female athlete before her. She is going to marry Jason Kenny. He won six gold medals. They are the most successful Olympic couple ever with 10 gold medals between them. Laura hopes to have children one day. She is an example to girls everywhere of what they can achieve.
🚦 Time to stop for more?
Full stops are like red traffic lights- without them there’d be chaos on the roads, and confusion in your writing! Imagine lots of sentences running into and crashing into each other! It’s not up to the reader to sort it all out for you- you have to make an effort to decide that a normal sentence has finished, and you show that it has by using a full stop. They also help when your work is read aloud. They help the reader pause and take a breath so they are ready to start the next sentence (later sections will look at the two other main ways to end a sentence: question and exclamation marks).
🎯💻There’s also an online quiz here to have a go at:
https://www.educationquizzes.com/ks3/english/punctuation-fullstops-01/
🎓 Sentences that end with a full stop are called declarative sentences because they say, or declare, a statement about something. The sentence doesn’t have to be true, but neither is it a question (which needs a question mark), or a dramatic or surprising revelation or emphasis (which needs an exclamation mark).