Using speech marks

Using speech marks

How and when should you use speech marks? Use these activities to help get you started:

Choose the correctly punctuated sentences in this interactive quiz. When you have made your choice, click Submit it to see if you have chosen the correct answer.

  • This interactive task will show you how to insert speech marks.

  • This website has exercises (.pdf 5.5KB) on inserting speech marks. You can record your answers in a Microsoft Word document.

Now that you know how to use speech marks, you can create a quiz using Adobe Captivate to teach others how to use them.

  • Firstly look at the Captivate tutorial.

  • When you have done this, open Captivate and select Blank project. In Select Size choose 980 for the Width and 490 for the Height to customise the size of the slides to fit the laptop screen, then press OK.

  • Choose Quiz and Question Slide then Short answer and then click on Graded Question. The first blank Question slide will appear. It is best to select a score of 1 in the Points section.

  • In the Name section, type the instruction. In the Question section type in a sentence that needs to have speech marks and other punctuation added. For example: What’s up he asked.

    In the Acceptable Answer section, type the answer or answers. Note that you will need to have versions with both single and double speech marks, and sometimes other punctuation too.

    In this case, there are four possible ways to correctly punctuate this sentence:

  • ‘What’s up?’ he asked. (Single speech marks and question mark.)

  • “What’s up?” he asked. (Double speech marks and question mark.)

  • ‘What’s up,’ he asked. (Single speech marks and comma.)

  • “What’s up,” he asked . (Double speech marks and comma.)

    When you have entered all the possible answers, click OK. You can edit the font, size and colour of your slide once you have done this. The three feedback boxes: Correct – Click anywhere or press ‘y’ to continue, Incorrect – Click anywhere or press ‘y’ to continue and You must answer the question before continuing, need to be expanded so that all the text is visible and then you can overlap them, as you will only need to see one of them on each slide.

  • When you have completed the questions, click on Preview and check your quiz.

  • When you are happy with it, click on Publish. Then your classmates can do the quiz.