Nursing Preparation Study Guide

Nursing Preparation Study Guide drove to the South to look at Civil War battle fields,” you do capitalize the word “South.” The difference is that in the first sentence “south” is just the direction you drove. In the second sentence “the South” is a specific region of the United States that formed itself into the Confederacy during the US Civil War. Proper Adjectives Proper adjectives are the adjective forms of proper nouns. People from Germany are German; people from Canada are Canadian. German and Canadian are proper adjectives be-cause they are forms of proper nouns that are used to describe other nouns. Titles of Works Titles of works are generally capitalized following a specific pattern. Capitalize all the important words in a sentence. Do not capitalize unimportant words such as prepositions and articles. For example: Alien Spaceship Spotted over Many of the World’s Capitals. Notice that the prepositions “over” and “of,” and the article “the” are the only non-capitalized words in the sentence. Colons, Semicolons, and Commas Within a sentence there are several different types of punctuation marks that can denote a pause. Each of these punctuation marks has different rules when it comes to its structure and usage, so we will look at each one in turn. Colons The colon is used primarily to introduce information. A colon can start lists such as in the sentence, “There were several things Susan had to get at the store: bread, cereal, lettuce and tomatoes.” Or a colon is used to point out specific information, such as in the sentence, “It was only then that the group fully realized what had happened: The Martian invasion had begun.” Note that if the information after the colon is a complete sentence, you capitalize and punctuate it exactly like you would a sentence. If, however, it does not constitute a complete sentence, you don’t have to capitalize anything. (“Peering out the window Meredith saw them: zombies.”) Semicolons Semicolon can be thought of as super commas. They denote a stronger stop than a comma does, but they are still weaker than a period, not quite capable of ending a sentence. Semicolons are primarily used to separate independent clauses that are not being separated by a coordinating conjunction. (“Chris went to the store; he bought chips and salsa.”) Semicolons can only do this, however, when the ideas in each clause are related. For instance, the sentence, “It’s raining outside; my sister went to the movies,” is not a proper usage of the semi-colon since those clauses have nothing to do with one another.

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