Hm! I am terribly intolerant of poor punctuation of direct speech.If I can teach seven-year-olds how to use it correctly, then there is little excuse for adults.

I recall reading a BIg Book, with small children, and to be honest, I hadn't checked the punctuation beforehand. At one stage a few hands were up, and I stopped.

It turned out that the direct speech was wrong, consistently so!

I'm a little bit of a drama queen, so I stopped and suggested we look at it the next day when I had the text ready for the students to punctuate on an overhead..

A few weeks later a colleague said, "Oh I don't bother teaching punctuation. They just don't get it.'

'Well mine 'get it', I thought to myself. But then I didn't use the term speech marks, or anything akin to that. We talked about opening and closing lips.

If, for instance, you open your lips, what happens to the first word? It's the first word in a sentence. What do we need? They knew.

I've been planning a post on this very same thing...for teachers. Maybe I should get it done!