Using Capital Letters


You use capital letters...

1. at the start of a sentence

a. Bali is an Indonesian Island.
b. It is a lovely day.

2. with proper nouns (particular persons, places and things):

a. Her name is Mary.
b. She lives in Spain.
c. She was born on Tuesday the sixth of June, 1998. She lives at 10 Greenstoke Avenue, Newbay, Bristol.

3. with adjectives that come from proper nouns

a. They live in a Georgian house.
b. He loved Japanese films.

4. for the first and all of the main words in titles

a. The Great Gatsby
b. The Queen of England
c. The Heart of Darkness
d. The University of Delaware
e. The Second World War

5. For the pronoun 'I'

a. In the future I hope that I will be able to visit Turkey.

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Puctuating Speech

Although you will still see the double quotation marks used to quote direct speech it is more and more common to punctuate speech and direct quotations with single quotation marks with the double quotation marks reserved for quoting 'speech within speech'.
Example:

'I haven't spoken to Peter for months,' Dianne said.'The last time I spoke to him he said, "I'm going to Bahrain and won't be back for about three years", I've heard nothing since then'.

Notice that the comma is placed within the quotation marks and that double quotation marks are only used when the quoted speaker is quoting someone else directly.
Other uses of the quotation mark
You will also have seen the single quotation marks used to mark out idiomatic expressions such as -

I've always thought that he was very annoying, a bit of a 'pain in the neck.'

They are also used outside of speech when quoting the title of a journal article:

'The Migration Flight of the Lesser Tweazle', by Jeremey Adams, in The Bird Spotter Magazine, July 2001.

(Note that there are a number of ways of organising such things as bibliographies which set out standard formats. Most organisations and academic institutions will prefer one of these or have their own format published in a 'style guide'.)

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