A
2. Students add to their flowchart for adjectives.
Adverbs of comparison
These are treated in the same way as adjectives, using er and est or
more and most.
For example:
Shane ran fast.
Ricky ran faster.
Guess who ran fastest?
or politely, more politely, most politely.
Adverbs modifying other parts of speech
Adverb modifying an adverb
For example:
Gilchrist scored runs really fast.
adv adv
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ADJECTIVES – ADVANCED
Descriptive
new
Proper
Ford (car)
PossessiveDistributive
each
Demonstrative
that (car)
Numeral
indefinite
several
ten (cars) ordinal
second

recognise, understand and use correctly the following punctuation
marks: full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, comma,
inverted commas and apostrophe.
So far, the exercises have been mainly straightforward and
not purposely complex, as they are designed to test the students’
learning and assess the efficacy of the instruction.
Inevitably the students will come across variations in sentence
structure that test their skills and sometimes ours as well. In gen-
eral, unless they are unreasonably intricate or complex – in which
case we may leave them to grammarians to unravel – they can be
analysed by logic. Before we embark on studying more complex
but well-constructed sentences there are a few gaps to fill. So, in
this section, we uncover some of the classifications that further
clarify the terms we have been using and are now familiar with.
Firstly, we look at the remaining punctuation marks, under-
standing of which will enable students to reach a higher level of
maturity in their own composition.
Colons
Definition: The word is from Greek, kolon, meaning ‘a limb’ and
is used to indicate that some connected information is to follow.
• The colon’s most common use is to precede a list, especially of
items consisting of more than one word (note its use after ‘for
example’).
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For example:
Here are some of the things you can do at our zoo: get close to
wild animals, feed the monkeys, cuddle a koala and observe a
platypus.
• The colon can provide a stop (or a short pause) between two

b. What time do you start school?
c. When do you have lunch?
3.
Students use colons to write these sentences in a more dramatic way.
a. He got badly hurt when he fell off his skateboard.
b. We couldn’t get in because Emma had gone off with the key.
c. A green ant bit me, so I screamed.
Note: It may be more effective to change around the order of
words.
4. Students find a quotation from one of their books and introduce it,
mentioning the speaker. See the example from Shakespeare on the
previous page
.
Semicolons
Margaret Fullerton, in ‘Summer On The Lakes’ 1844, likened semi-
colons to the stops in a paragraph of thoughts about one’s life.
This is probably a very good description, as semicolons provide
a pause between connected thoughts and lie somewhere between
commas and full stops. For the more mature writer, semicolons are
very effective because they suggest a balance, but to avoid misuse
and confusion, it is wise not to introduce semicolons too early.
Perhaps the best way to describe semicolons is to say that they
link associated thoughts or statements.
For example:
The mantis rested on a green leaf; you might never notice it there.
He had no food; nor did he have any money.
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