Which of the following sentences is correctly punctuated? John announced, “The library is closing in five minutes.” John announced “The library is closing in five minutes” John announced The library is closing in five minutes.” John announced “The library is closing in five minutes.” Which sentence is capitalized correctly? Why don’t we get together to watch the Academy Awards? why don’t we get together to watch the Academy Awards? Why don’t we get together to watch the academy awards? why don’t we get together to watch the academy awards?
The Correct Answer and Explanation is:
Correctly Punctuated Sentence:
The sentence “John announced, ‘The library is closing in five minutes.'” is the correctly punctuated one.
Explanation:
- Quotation Marks and Commas: When you include a quote within a sentence, the comma must come before the opening quotation mark. This is a standard rule in American English. In this case, the comma after “announced” is correct. The sentence has a clear introductory phrase (“John announced”), which is followed by a direct quote (“The library is closing in five minutes”).
- End Punctuation: In the correct version, the quotation ends with a period. Since the quoted sentence is a complete statement, a period is placed inside the quotation marks.
- Other Options:
- “John announced ‘The library is closing in five minutes'” lacks a comma before the quotation, which breaks the rule for introductory elements.
- “John announced The library is closing in five minutes.” omits quotation marks entirely, which would be incorrect since the sentence is supposed to include a direct quote.
- “John announced ‘The library is closing in five minutes.'” also lacks the comma after “announced,” which makes it incorrect.
Correctly Capitalized Sentence:
The sentence “Why don’t we get together to watch the Academy Awards?” is correctly capitalized.
Explanation:
- Capitalization of the First Word: The first word of a sentence should always be capitalized. In this case, “Why” is the first word of the sentence, so it should begin with a capital letter.
- Capitalization of Proper Nouns: “Academy Awards” is a specific event name, which is a proper noun. Both words should be capitalized.
- Other Options:
- “why don’t we get together to watch the Academy Awards?” is incorrect because the first word (“why”) should be capitalized at the start of a sentence.
- “Why don’t we get together to watch the academy awards?” is incorrect because “academy awards” is a proper noun and should be capitalized as “Academy Awards.”
- “why don’t we get together to watch the academy awards?” suffers from both the lowercase “why” and “academy awards” being improperly capitalized.
So, the key takeaway here is that both punctuation (commas before quotes) and capitalization (first word of sentences, proper nouns) follow specific rules to ensure clarity and correctness.
