Speech Marks

You should be familiar with speech marks and their different forms, following your work over the past few days. Keep these in your head, they will come up in your work today as well!

Today we are going to think about another way in which speech marks can be used with in a sentence or sentences.

So far you have come across speech marks that look a little something like this:

1.  "What's for dinner?" Ryan asked his dad.

or

2. The mouse looked at the fox and whimpered, "Please don't eat me!"

You may see speech marks in a slightly different way too. A sentence or group of sentences may contain more than one set of speech marks.

Here are a few examples to show you what we mean.

1. "We went to the seaside at the weekend," said Sophie, "and it was very sunny."

Notice here how the sentence has been broken up by the comma and therefore two sets of speech marks are needed. In this case you don't need to start off the second set of speech marks with a capital letter.

2. "I'm stuck!" declared Sam as he held up his hand. "Can you help me please?"

In this example there are two different sentences. We know this because the exclamation mark after the work stuck brings the sentence to an end. This is why we need a capital letter at the beginning of the word can, in the second set of speech marks.