Editing a Newsletter Paragraph
A pupil is editing a paragraph for the school newsletter. The draft reads: ‘Last wednesday, our class visited the science museum we saw a robot that could solve a rubiks cube. Mrs Patel said, “remember to write down three facts.” Me and my friend was chosen to try the robot. It moved slowly but it did not drop the cube.’ The teacher asks for three corrections only: one capital letter, one punctuation mark to separate the two clauses about the museum, and one verb agreement or pronoun correction. The pupil suggests changing ‘wednesday’ to ‘Wednesday’, adding a comma after ‘museum’, and changing ‘was’ to ‘were’. The teacher says the capital letter is right, but the comma is not enough to separate two complete sentences, and ‘were’ still leaves the subject wrong. The pupil must also decide whether ‘remember’ should start with a capital letter inside the quotation and whether ‘rubiks’ needs an apostrophe.
1. Make the three corrections and explain each rule.
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Answer: The three corrections are:
- ‘wednesday’ → ‘Wednesday’. Days of the week are proper nouns, so they need a capital letter.
- Put a full stop or semicolon after ‘museum’: ‘…visited the science museum. We saw…’ or ‘…visited the science museum; we saw…’. A comma alone would be a comma splice because ‘our class visited the science museum’ and ‘we saw a robot’ are both complete clauses.
- ‘Me and my friend was chosen’ → ‘My friend and I were chosen’. The pronoun must be the subject form ‘I’, not the object form ‘me’, and the compound subject ‘My friend and I’ takes ‘were’, not ‘was’.
2. Correct ‘Me and my friend was chosen’ fully and explain why the pronoun case matters.
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Answer: The correct sentence is: ‘My friend and I were chosen to try the robot.’
‘Me’ is an object pronoun, used after a preposition or verb, as in ‘They chose me.’ Here the pronoun is part of the subject of ‘were chosen’, so the subject pronoun ‘I’ is needed. In a compound subject, put the other person first: ‘My friend and I’. The verb must agree with the plural subject, so ‘were’ is correct.
3. Punctuate the quotation and ‘rubiks’ correctly.
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Answer: The quotation should be: Mrs Patel said, “Remember to write down three facts.”
‘Remember’ needs a capital letter because it begins a complete spoken sentence inside the quotation marks. The full stop belongs inside the quotation because it is part of what Mrs Patel said.
‘rubiks cube’ should be ‘Rubik’s Cube’: ‘Rubik’ is a proper noun, so it takes a capital letter, and the apostrophe shows possession or naming. ‘Cube’ is also usually capitalised in the product name.