11 plus Spot the Punctuation Mistake questions

What a Spot the Punctuation Mistake question looks like

A Spot the Punctuation Mistake question gives your child one sentence, split into four labelled parts, and asks which part contains the punctuation mistake. There is a fifth choice, N, for a sentence that is already correct, and about one in six is. It is one of the sentence-level English formats that 11 plus papers use, and the one that most often catches out a confident reader.

What sets it apart from its neighbours is that every word is spelled correctly and every sentence is grammatical: the only thing at fault is a punctuation mark or a capital letter, and far more often than not it is a mark missing altogether rather than a wrong one sitting on the page to be seen. A child reading for meaning sails straight past it, because the sentence makes perfect sense without it.

The sentences are ordinary Year 5 and Year 6 narrative: school trips, campsites, rescued hedgehogs, market stalls, rehearsals. The faults fall into five groups. Commas lead by a distance, whether after an opening phrase, between the first two items of a list of three, or before a closing speech mark. Then sentence endings, where two sentences run together with no full stop, or a question ends with nothing at all. Then speech marks, missing at one end. Then apostrophes, absent from a possessive, misplaced in a plural, or added where none belongs. Last, capital letters, on a name, a month or a place, or at the start of a new sentence.

Example one

A. After the long / B. journey the injured owl / C. was finally safe at / D. the rescue centre.

Read it aloud and you pause after “journey”, because “After the long journey” sets the scene before the real sentence begins. A phrase like that needs a comma to close it, and the comma belongs to the word “journey”, which is in part B.

The answer is B.

Part A is the tempting wrong choice, because the opening phrase begins there. The mark does not go at the start of the phrase, though. It goes at the end, and by then the phrase has crossed into part B. Once you have found the missing mark, the part you want is the one holding the word it attaches to.

Example two

A. “Please stay / B. close” Mrs Hartley urged / C. as they trudged through / D. the deep snow.

Someone speaks, and afterwards we are told who spoke. When the speech comes first, a comma goes at the end of the spoken words, tucked inside the closing speech mark: “Please stay close,” Mrs Hartley urged. Here there is no comma at all, and it belongs straight after “close”, in part B.

The answer is B.

Part A tempts because it holds the opening speech mark, and speech marks are the first thing the eye lands on. Nothing is wrong with them: they open in A and close in B, exactly where they should. The other pull is to want the comma after “urged”. It goes with the speech, not with the person who spoke.

Example three

A. Before setting off, / B. they packed maps, / C. snacks and torches into / D. their worn rucksacks.

The opening phrase has its comma. The list has its comma after “maps”. Nothing is missing and nothing has been added that should not be there, so the answer is N.

This one is worth working through because of the list. Children are often taught to put a comma between every item, and here there is none before “and”: maps, snacks and torches. That is correct in the way we punctuate in Britain, and part C is exactly what a child picks when they expect one. A child who has decided in advance that there is always a mistake will always find one, and it will always be the wrong answer.

How to answer it

1. Read the whole sentence before you look at the labels, as though you were reading it aloud, and listen for where your voice pauses or stops.
2. Check the very end first. A sentence should finish with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark, and a missing end mark is the easiest of all to read past.
3. Now hunt for marks that should be there and are not, in this order: capital letters on names and at the start of sentences, commas after an opening phrase and inside a list, speech marks and the comma inside them, apostrophes.
4. When you find it, work out which word the mark belongs to and choose the part that word sits in. That is often one part earlier or later than the one you first reached for.
5. Read the sentence back with the mark put in. If it sounds right, answer it. If everything was in place all along, choose N and move on.

Common mistakes

• Choosing the part where something starts rather than the part where the mark goes. An opening phrase and a piece of speech both begin in one part and end in the next, and the mark belongs at the end.
• Putting the comma outside the speech marks. In “Please stay close,” the comma sits before the closing mark, not after it.
• Expecting a comma before “and” in a list. Maps, snacks and torches is right as it stands, and looking for a comma there turns a correct sentence into a wrong answer.
• Missing two sentences run together, because both halves read well. Take “The train rattled through the valley Later, they spotted the distant lights of the city.” The clue is the capital letter in the middle with no full stop in front of it.
• Never choosing N. A child who assumes something must be wrong will hunt until they find something, take twice as long doing it, and answer incorrectly on a sentence they should have banked in seconds.

How to practise 11 plus Spot the Punctuation Mistake questions

The most useful thing you can do at home costs nothing: when your child gets one wrong, do not tell them where the mark goes. Ask them to read the sentence aloud and stop where they would naturally stop, then ask what mark shows a reader to stop there. Nine times out of ten they place it themselves, and the habit of hearing a sentence rather than scanning it is what carries over into the paper. Short and regular beats long and occasional, which is the pattern we set out in how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day. 11+ Daily has a Spot the Punctuation Mistake project alongside the other English formats, on laptop, tablet or phone, and the full list is on our 11 plus English practice page. Every question is original to 11+ Daily, nothing is a past paper and nothing is licensed from another publisher, and the bank is re-checked in rounds.

Questions parents ask