This blog is mostly about teaching and learning English. I am a teacher educator in Singapore and I write for teachers, parents and anyone else interested in English education particularly at the primary school level.

Sometimes I have the urge to write about stuff from my everyday life and tell stories from my childhood. I often give in to these urges. Nobody has to read everything here. But as Lionel Shriver once wrote,
" Untold stories didn't seem quite to have happened."
Life does happen, so let the stories unfold...



Saturday, April 10, 2010

Punctuation again

I got up early this morning and as I was going through the newspapers, Tiger Woods and punctuation jumped out at me from page 2 of The Straits Times. Here's the beginning of the article entitled Tiger's above par back where he belongs, written by Rohit Brijnath.

Phirr. Trring. Beep-beep. At 7.30 pm in Oslo, 1.30 am in Singapore, 3.30 am in Melbourne, alarms remind us. Wake up, stop work, put down your drink. The Tiger Woods Salvation Show is about to commence at the Masters.

Many teachers know about my interest in Tiger Woods but it's not Tiger that I am interested in here. Instead, study the opening lines and the use of onomatopoeic (sound) words there. Notice the lack of quotation marks. Notice the spelling of the sound words. Share these with your pupils.

Of course, the newspapers have their own house style too, so this is not necessarily the last word on this issue. But, this is one possible way of handling the use of such words in writing.
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