Page 118 - How to write effective business English your guide to excellent professional communication by Fiona Talbot

Punctuation and grammar tips 107

Speech or single quotation marks or inverted commas: ‘ ’

Question mark: ?
Exclamation mark: !
Apostrophe: ’
Hyphen or dash: -

Slash or stroke: /
Brackets: ( )
Square brackets: [ ]
Ampersand: &
‘At’ sign: @
Colon: :

Semicolon: ;
Asterisk: *

Parts of speech and other grammar

Parts of speech

In English grammar, words are categorized into what we term parts
of speech. These include nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, ad-
verbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections.
A noun names a person, place or thing. For example:

girl, London, newspaper;
The man drank his coffee.

A pronoun is a word that can take the place of a noun, and func-
tions like it. For example:

I, this, who, he, they;
There’s Peter, who won the lottery.

Notice how the noun ‘Peter’ became the pronoun ‘who’ within the
same sentence.