Punctuation and capitalization

Punctuation and capitalization are the marks and rules that make written English clear and correct. Every sentence begins with a capital letter, and we also capitalize the pronoun 'I', proper nouns (names of people, places, days, months, languages and nationalities such as Ali, London, Monday, July, English) and the first word in direct speech. A sentence ends with one of three marks: a full stop (.) for a statement, a question mark (?) for a question, and an exclamation mark (!) for strong feeling or surprise. The comma (,) is used to separate items in a list, to mark off a person we are speaking to, and after introductory words; we do not normally join two complete sentences with only a comma. The apostrophe (') has two jobs: it shows possession (Sara's book, the boys' room) and it marks the missing letters in a contraction (do not → don't, it is → it's). Quotation marks (" ") surround a person's exact words. For example: the careless line 'tom said i live in baku' should be written 'Tom said, "I live in Baku."' with capital letters, a comma and quotation marks.