Witness Statements How punctuation affects meaning

Glaring us He was angry. He the boys tomorrow at. the whiteboard pen The door banged shut. swinging on its hinges The blue car was in the garage. No one said anything. Silently, we left the room. We had no homework that day QUCK RECAP What were the three features that are required for a group of words to be a sentence? It ends with a full stop or equivalent It MUST start with a capital letter It must make sense on its own

Slide W1.5 It’s not there It’s not there. It’s not there! It’s not there? Statement Exclamation Question

Paired work In pairs, work out your own example of a similar sentence. That is – a sentence that can be a command, a statement or a question. Who’s brave enough to perform theirs to the class?

Discussion: How does different punctuation affect the meaning of a sentence?

Questions, commands or statements? 1.Stop doing that now. 2.I’ll mark your homework. 3.Is it alright to ask each other? 4.Stand up! 5.Turn over the test paper. 6.Don’t start giggling. 7.I think you could begin the next one. 8.What did you think it meant? 9.Have you finished? 10.You can work together as a group. 11.I’d like you to check your answers. 12.Do you think you did that well? C S Q E C C S Q Q S S Q

Simple sentences He ran. He ran fast. He ran all the way home. He ran fast all the way home. One subject and main verb

Hi. I’m Claire. I am fourteen years old. I love music. I download hundreds of tracks. I share them with my friends. School is OK. I’d rather be somewhere else though! Brush the pan with melted butter. Slice the apples into chunks. Add the apples to the pan. The monkey jumped from tree to tree. It flew through the air. The monkey landed on a great big leaf. I remember my first training session. It was really hard. The coach pushed us to the edge. My fitness needed to improve. What are the good things about writing using simple sentences? And the bad things? Positives: They’re easy to read and understand They can be used for emphasis Negative: Too many simple sentences can make your writing dull and repetitive

What are the punctuation rules? Full stop/exclamation mark/question mark or ellipsis at the end of a sentence. Capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and for a person, place and date. Separate extra information with a comma. Use commas in a list, after an ‘ly’ opener, when we have used speech marks, if you start a sentence with a connective use a comma after, if the connective is in the middle of a sentence, use it before. Use a semi colon instead of ‘because’.

Imagine… You have seen the murderer. You need to create a profile for them to take with you to create a photo fit for the police. The better your description, the greater chance we have of catching them. What information do we need? I shouldn’t have been there, I know that, but I couldn’t resist.

Look at your work Have you included? Different sentence openers? Ambitious vocabulary? Different sentences? What could you add to improve this?