Q5: Punctuation and prepositions

Understanding the topic

This punctuation passage contains direct speech, which raises the difficulty sharply, because quotation marks, the commas around them and the capital letters inside them all have to be right together.

(a) Punctuation

While taking a nap on the porch one hot summer day, Hodga dreamed that a stranger promised to give him ten pieces of gold. The stranger placed them in Hodga's hand one by one, until he reached the tenth piece, which he hesitated to give him. "Come on, what are you waiting for?" said Hodga. "You promised me ten!" Just then he woke up. He immediately looked at his hand and saw that it was empty. He quickly shut his eyes again, stretched out his hand, and said, "All right, I'll settle for nine."

What was added and why. The opening phrase is introductory, so it takes a comma before the main clause. "Hodga" and "Hodgas" need capitals and an apostrophe. The dialogue takes double quotation marks with the question mark inside them, and "said Hodga" follows without a further comma because the question mark already closes the sentence. A comma precedes the final piece of speech, and "I'll" needs its apostrophe.

(b) Prepositions

(ii) She sat in the shade of the tree.

(iii) The moon does not shine by its own light.

(iv) The burglar jumped over the compound wall.

(v) She entered into an agreement with them.

(viii) It cannot be done without offence.

How to choose. Two of these are worth memorising as fixed forms. "Shine by its own light" is idiomatic and "shine with" would be wrong. "Enter into" is required for agreements and negotiations, whereas "enter" alone is used for rooms and buildings, which is why the preposition is present here and absent there. The rest follow from physical sense: shade encloses, so "in", and a wall is crossed, so "over".