NGSA English: Spelling and Punctuation

The Spelling and Punctuation domain tests whether you can spell common words correctly and use punctuation to make meaning clear. NGSA items ask you to spot the correctly spelled word, choose the right homophone, form plurals and possessives, and select the sentence with correct capitals, commas, apostrophes, and quotation marks. Accuracy matters: one wrong apostrophe can change the meaning of a sentence.

Spelling rules worth mastering

• Add -s for most plurals; add -es after s, x, z, ch, or sh: buses, boxes, churches.
• For a consonant plus y, change y to i and add -es: baby becomes babies. Keep the y after a vowel: keys.
• Some words ending in f or fe change to ves: leaf becomes leaves, knife becomes knives.
• Drop a silent e before a vowel suffix: hope becomes hoping; keep it before a consonant suffix: hopeful.
• Double the final consonant in a one-syllable word ending consonant-vowel-consonant: run becomes running.
• Use i before e except after c, but learn the common exceptions: receive, ceiling, weird, seize.
• Learn commonly misspelled words: separate, definitely, necessary, accommodate, believe, until, because, friend.

Punctuation rules

• Capitalise the first word of a sentence, proper nouns, titles, the pronoun I, and the first word of a direct quotation.
• Use a full stop for a statement, a question mark for a question, and an exclamation mark for strong feeling.
• Use commas in a list, after an introductory phrase, before a coordinating conjunction joining two independent clauses, and around extra information.
• Use an apostrophe plus s for a singular possessive (Maya's book) and s plus an apostrophe for a plural possessive (the girls' bags). Irregular plurals take apostrophe plus s (children's).
• Use quotation marks for a speaker's exact words, with the punctuation inside: 'Bring your books tomorrow.'
• Use a colon to introduce a list and a semicolon to join two closely related independent clauses.

Worked example

Choose the correctly punctuated sentence: 'The girls' uniforms were hanging in the closet, but Maya's was still wet.' Reasoning: girls' is a plural possessive because the uniforms belong to more than one girl. Maya's is a singular possessive. The comma before but is correct because but joins two independent clauses. Answer: the sentence as written.

Traps that cost marks

• Putting an apostrophe in a simple plural: the 1990s, not the 1990's.
• Confusing it's (it is) with its (belonging to it).
• Writing a comma splice: two independent clauses joined by only a comma.
• Forgetting the comma after an introductory phrase.
• Capitalising common nouns such as school or river unless they are part of a proper name.