Style & mechanics from A1 to C2

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# 16 Style & mechanics ## A1 - Capital letter at the start of a sentence and for I - Capitals for names of people and places - Period (full stop) and question mark ## A2 - Contractions (I'm, don't, can't, won't) - 's = is or has; 'd = had or would - Apostrophe for possession, never for plurals - Commas in lists - Capitals for days, months, languages, nationalities and titles - Nationality adjectives and nouns (Iranian, Persian, Dutch, Swiss) - Vocatives and forms of address (Come here, John; Thank you, Mr. Smith) and their commas ## B1 - Commas after introductory words and clauses - Commas around extra information - Direct speech: quotation marks and punctuation ## B2 - Colons and semicolons - Dashes and hyphens - Simple, compound and complex sentences - Run-on sentences, comma splices and fragments ## C1 - Formal vs informal grammar - One-word (Latinate) verbs vs phrasal verbs - Contractions and formality - The grammar of politeness (indirectness, softening) - Heads and tails (That film, it was great. / He's nice, your brother.) - Spoken ellipsis (Sounds good. Want a coffee?) - Vague language (and stuff, sort of, or something) - Semicolons with linking adverbs - Colons for explanation and emphasis - Parentheses and dashes for asides - Punctuating long sentences clearly ## C2 - Mandative subjunctive (insist / demand / recommend that he be) - Formulaic subjunctive (Be that as it may, Come what may, Suffice it to say, Far be it from me, So be it, If need be, Long live…) - were-subjunctive (If I were…, as it were) - British should alternative (I suggest that he should…) - May you be happy (wishes) - Response tokens (Absolutely. Fair enough. Exactly.) - mind you, as it happens, come to think of it, that said - Quotative be like / go (And she was like, “No way!”) - Impersonal academic style - Tenses for citing research (Smith argues / argued / has argued) - Nominal style in academic writing - Tricolon and lists of three - Antithesis and chiasmus - Anaphora (repetition at the start of clauses) - Emphatic structures for persuasion - Headline grammar (PM to quit; Jobs cut) - Notes, signs, recipes and instructions - Messages and texting conventions - thou, thee, thy, thine (for recognition) - -eth / -est verb endings (for recognition) - whence, whither, hence, thence - Poetic word order - US vs UK verbs: gotten, have got, shall, present perfect use - US vs UK prepositions: on/at the weekend, different from/than/to - US vs UK collective nouns - US vs UK use of the subjunctive - Australian, Indian and other Englishes - who vs whom in real usage - Ending a sentence with a preposition - less vs fewer in real usage - data is / data are - between you and I - Starting a sentence with And or But - Double negatives in dialects - The serial (Oxford) comma - Restrictive vs non-restrictive commas - Hyphenation rules - En and em dashes - Ellipsis marks (…) - Quotation punctuation: US vs UK - Verbal over nominal style for clarity - Redundant pairs and empty phrases - Cutting wordiness - The most common learner errors - Common native-speaker errors (your / you're, its / it's, could of) - An editing checklist - Non-standard agreement in speech (we was, he don't, there's three people), for recognition - Repairs, false starts and unfinished sentences in speech

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