I have almost never met a secondary age child who doesn’t conceptually understand how to use a capital letter.* But, you’d never know. Students regularly hand in work liberally sprinkled with missing – or extraneous – capitals and conscientious teachers spend hours circling the errors and patiently explaining why proper nouns and words at the beginning of a new sentence need capitals. In return, students say, “I know. It’s just the way I write.”
It’s pointless to give someone feedback about something they already know – lack of knowledge isn’t the problem. The problem is caused by practice. Contrary to what my mum believed when she’d tell me that ‘practice makes perfect’, what practice actually makes is permanent. The more we practice something the more automatic it becomes. If we practice doing something badly we get better at doing it badly. For students, many of them have become superb at not using capital letters.
This is frustrating for teachers. After all, we get them right all the time. If I’m writing a shopping list I don’t have an internal debate over whether to give Marmite a capital letter, I just do it. You know how students can write their own names in lower case? I can do that, but it takes an extraordinary effort.
The answer is, of course, to practise getting capital letters – and all the other boring technical aspects of writing – right and to make sure students correct their mistakes. It’s not enough to practice until children get it right, we need to get them to practice until they can’t fail. Using capital letters needs to be automatic.
Writing is essentially unnatural. Children don’t independently learn to write in the way they learn to speak. Speaking is something we’ve evolved to do over millennia. Writing has only been around for a few thousand years and it’s only in the last 100 or so years that we’ve expected everyone to be able to do it. We are not evolutionarily adapted for writing.
That said, complex as it may be, pretty much everyone can be taught to write, but our working memory is fragile. Most people are only able to hold on to about seven items or less at any one time, and anything which occupies our attention reduces our capacity to think. If, when we’re writing we trying to remember spelling and punctuation conventions, as well as trying to communicate what we know about a subjects aw well as trying to make what we know sound interesting, we very quickly become overburdened. There’s too much to remember and something has to give. Although students may know how to use a capital letter or how to spell ‘necessary’, if it’s not automatic, they’ll forget to do it.
These things need to be embedded in long-term memory. When we’ve stored a process in long-term memory it tends to become automatic. Remember when you learned to drive a car? At first the experience was overwhelming. You can to pay attention to the steering wheel, the gear stick, the pedals, the mirrors, your speed and what everyone else on the road was doing. You crept along at 20 miles per hour and it felt terrifying! You stalled, you instructor yanked the wheel to avoid hitting a Renault 5, you ended each lesson with a tension headache. Then, six months after passing your test, you found yourself half way done the M5 with conscious awareness of the last 30 minutes. We’re very good at automising skills. As soon as we can make a process automatic, we do.
Writing is similarly complex. The trouble is that if we don’t automise using capital letters – or anything else – we’ll automise not using them to make space in working memory to think about more interesting things.
In my next post I’ll write about solutions to the Capital Letter Problem in more detail.
* That’s not to say there are none, just that they’re rare.
Why do we need a capital letter at the start of a sentence?
Capital letters are a convention which exists to make it easier for readers to see where a sentences begins and thus makes a text easier to read. Using a capital is also ‘correct’. Not using one biases readers against you.
Great article. This is why I insist on children correcting the basics every time. I like the learning to drive comparison.
When I have private pupils for English (I teach MFL in school), I simply teach them the distinction between common and proper nouns. It’s a distinction they never fail to understand but what they sometimes struggle with is classifying words. They know the hackneyed definitions all linguists loathe, but they can’t use these to categorise words. They cannot analyse language without grammatical knowledge. All they have is a vague feeling instilled by practice, good or bad. As a result of this, they are very amateur writers and poor linguists utterly lacking in the knowledge, memory and practice to write well. Thankfully, I make a good deal of money from this through private tutoring but I pity the children and parents who are either ignorant of the situation or lack the resources to do much about it.
This is a knowledge deficit rather than a practice deficit and therefore not really the same thing I’m writing about. If students don’t fully understand how to do something they need clear feedback and explicit instruction. I’m talking about those students who fail to use capital letters when writing their own name; they know this is incorrect and yet they continue to make the mistake.
Children not capitalising their names does not seem to be down to lack of knowledge or practice, I will concede that. They should write it often enough but that simply exposes other flaws. Allowing children to be lazy, not writing but forever sticking in the sheets given them means the humdrum tasks by which we perfect everyday writing is lacking. I am afraid it is a false example.
There is a knowledge deficit among teachers. I have been in staff meetings where teachers were urged not to misuse capitalisation in reports by deputy heads. On that occasion, when someone asked for the rule as to when words other than names were capitalised, I was the only one who knew and who could explain it. Practice is not the problem here – if teachers do not know the most fundamental rules of grammar, they cannot correct the work students produce. They may well leave work uncorrected and, by the time they sit the GCSE, it is too late.
The final element is how the lack of knowledge affects how children write. Grammatical knowledge eventually allows students to read more knowingly and more critically, which affects their own writing. In turn, they can read with a view to improving their own writing. Knowledge is important for being an agent in one’s own writing and rising above the level of habit. Self-improvement flows largely from this, not from formulaic self-assessment or the like.
I am looking forward to the solutions! A perennial problem…
The obvious solution is that it is all sorted by the end of ks1.
I think you will find this changing over the next few years now the interim assessment framework insists on proper use to achieve the expected standard at ks1 – let alone 2. We have certainly become a lot more focused on perfect punctuation. The downside is the veritable swarm of semi colons appearing soon in year 7. This is the one area where we find comparative judgment tricky. Should all pieces with capital letter flaws go to the bottom of the pile – regardless of content? Maybe like the Olympic divers and gymnasts work should be marked for difficulty and then again for execution. I couldn’t quite work out how the formula worked, but certainly ambitious, difficult routines were really marked down if not executed with a high degree of technical proficiency; but neither could you boost your score by playing safe. Only we would call it sophistication (complexity of use of language and structure) and accuracy (punctuation, spelling and basic grammar such as verb tense agreement) and to rank highly, both need to be evident.
Daisy C said the best writers tend to have the best punctuation anyway – I think this is true, and at the other extreme both sophistication and accuracy are poor. It’s in the middle mass of students that we find lots of students who are much better at one aspect than the other.
Behind the scenes in tech/software world there is a very strong preference, convention in quite a few areas, for case-insensitivity and lower-case everything because case sensitivity slows people down. You can type “www.learningspy.co.uk” to get here, rather than having to carefully type “WWW.LearningSpy.Co.UK”.
It’s a short hop from there to ubiquitous gadgets and predictive text magic. A lot of practice will be “doing it badly” i.e. you can type lower-case with those busy thumbs, and for the most part the tech takes care of the capital letters.
Your list of sub skills for writing lacks one. Language needs to be formalised for writing. If a child’s spoken language is ungrammatical then writing is more difficult for them, than for children whose spoken language at home is closer to a written form. The richness of vocabulary used in spoken language at home also has an effect on writing standards. This is one of the contributors to the achievement gap between children from lower and higher income families. Then, for some, the physical process of hand writing or typing can also cause difficulty and impair the ability to write.
I haven’t presented a “list of sub skills for writing” in this post so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. You might find this post useful: https://www.learningspy.co.uk/literacy/theory-writing/
Spelling, punctuation and language use for communication are sub skills for writing. As are formulating sentences, paragraphs, handwriting/keyboard skills and maintaining focus.
I thought your piece very good indeed. I’m not sure every teacher realises how complex writing is.
At primary level I teach children to self edit a short piece of writing several times. First – does the piece convey the meaning? Change words so that it does. Second – look for spelling mistakes. Change those recognised. Draw a wiggly pencil line under those to be checked then check them. Third – correct punctuation errors (including use of capital letters). Fourth – paragraphs. Fifth – re write for neatness and legibility or type.
Only for a very short piece of writing so that the reward for the pupil is a perfect piece to be proud of. It would be a boring excercise if the piece was more than half a page…and dispiriting.
Children often use a capital B in the early stages of learning literacy because they have problems differentiating b and d. Sometimes this habit gets “stuck”.
I mean they’ll but capital B in the middle of words. It is quite common in primary schools.
thanks david. i look forward to reading the next post on solving this. i’m having to fight autocorrect not to capitalise here – do you think that’s part of the issue?
Thank goodness you have raised this issue, David, and I look forward to seeing your solution. The damage is done, I suggest, from the very beginning of teaching reading and writing when there is an avoidance of capital letters, for example, in early phonics work – and where so many adults perceive the capital letters as their letter names ‘ay’, ‘bee’, ‘see’ rather than the sounds they are code for.
Then, there is, and has been for many decades, an enormous value placed on children’s independent free writing from the earliest age and, of course, teachers are not trained how to deal with addressing this early writing.
We have a fundamentally flawed approach to addressing punctuation weakness. Take, for example, the number of literacy programmes that provide a piece of text full of errors (spelling and punctuation absence) and then the exercise is for the children to recognise the errors and correct them.
But how many competent writers would write a whole page of text devoid of capital letters and then go back to put them at the end of writing? I’ve asked that question of swathes of teachers and the answer is virtually that no-one does this. So why give the children an exercise to do that is not related to what we want.
Punctuating with capital letters should be taught thoroughly, and reinforced from the get-go and there should be far, far more sentence work in the infants. The truth is that teachers have been hugely pressurised to do ‘genre writing’ before many of the children have really cracked simply ‘writing’.
Thus, it’s about the balance of structured, controlled type writing activities and a more free-for-all writing activity where the emphasis is on content and genre rather than correct sentences and punctuation.
I can’t wait to see how this thread develops and what you consider the solutions to be – but it’s high time that something so straightforward but painfully unsuccessful was raised by a literacy specialist.
By the way, I also think it’s wrong to present children with wrong spellings in exercises and then ask them to correct them. Spelling ability is fragile and it’s so easy to put the ‘wrong’ spelling in children’s heads in place of the correct one. (In adult heads too.)
Warm regards,
Debbie
Sadly, we often see credits at the end of Tv programmes using lower case for actors’ names and this doesn’t help enforce the rules for young people.
Hello and thanks for bringing this topic up. I can relate to the fact that many children have spent so many years effectively practising *not* putting a capital letter in that it becomes an ingrained bad habit. Like poor handwriting, it is so, so difficult for the teacher of older primary children to correct (in addition to covering gaps in learning and the year group expectations).
Like Debbie, I also think that far too much emphasis is placed n creative writing versus what I call ‘nuts and bolts’ writing that helps to automate basic skills such as popping a capital letter in where appropriate. Added to this is the attitude that predominates, because primary ed is still heavily progressive (look at the ethos/mission statements of all state primary schools: they will all tout ‘child-centred’ education), that the child will do something when they’re *ready* and you have a recipe for allowing children to form very bad habits indeed. The whole ‘when they’re ready’ thing is a lovely catch-all excuse for progressive primary educators.
[…] my last post I explained what I defined what I’m calling The Capital Letter Problem and set out some of its causes. Briefly, children pick up and embed bad habits when writing and, […]
I agree absolutely with your comments about ‘conceptual understanding’. What are your thoughts on the fact that circling capital letter errors is a key element of many literacy marking policies and would be given as evidence of ‘good’ literacy across the curriculum at ks3&4? I am still seeing many books, including English books, where we see targets like ‘check your capital letters’ which are not being challenged by HoDs or SLTs.
Teachers correcting students’ mistakes for them undermines their ability to do it for themselves.
Agreed.
This is one of the fundamental tenets of Reading Recovery.
Using capital letter correctly is one of the basic sign of you been a good writer. You can’t just overlook it. Thanks for this post. Its helpful.
Should this be here or in number 2?
Tiny things that might help:
“Full stop, capital letter” is often more effective than “Start every sentence with a capital letter.”
A visual aid stuck to the table in front of those who don’t do it automatically is also useful and effective. Those who need the reminder will use it. Those that don’t, won’t. Those that need it will wean themselves off of needing it. Like stabiliser wheels on a first bike.
Also, “I’m not going to mark this, it has no capital letters. Please read it and find what needs fixing up, thanks. Fix it or underline what needs sorting.”
And a big thing:
Children need their ears tuned in to “What is a sentence? Can I hear a sentence start and end?” Like being asked to draw something one has never seen, or seen drawn, being asked to demarcate sentences when one is not sure what a sentence is, is asking for trouble.
[…] make careless mistakes they well automate the process of making mistakes. I call this ‘The Capital Letter Problem‘. The solution is to make proofreading your minimum expectation for any written work […]
Trying easy to deliver, frequent, practical solutions like those suggested by Pat appeals to me.
I totally agree with David. If I tell a child of even 7 or 8 years old, and certainly up at age 16, that they have missed 4 full stops/capital letters in a piece of writing, they can almost always tell me exactly where they should go. It isn’t a lack of knowledge. It is all about replacing existing habits – replacing the habit NOT to punctuate, not to edit, not to proofread.
I’d like to hear more on solutions for cracking punctuation too… looking forward to it.
A few thoughts for older juniors/secondary:
1. Getting them editing at all is an uphill struggle. I try to convince students that evidence of editing is the best evidence of sophisticated thought. Students seem to think of crossing out as messy. I have a real fight on my hands to stop students ripping pages out or throwing paper away with just a word or two on it because they’ve ‘made a mistake’.
I use “1000 years of English Literature” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Years-English-Literature-Chris-Fletcher/dp/071234814X to show photographs of draft, hand-edited pages from the works of Keats, Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Plath, Pinter, Ballard and Bainbridge. These particular drafts are really good examples of how authors cross out, change order, add paragraphs, insert words, delete phrases and so on. Students are always amazed. They seem to think that authors produce perfect sentences at once. Of course, children only ever get to see the neat, clean, printed page in books and rarely any of the thinking and reworking of writers. I show them the evidence and tell them that if these authors need to cross out and edit to produce great works, we mere amateurs definitely do.
The photographs seem to get the message across effectively.
2. After saying all that, I really do have to set aside quality time with every piece of work for editing. I try to do this after only a short time of writing so that they edit paragraphs, parts of paragraphs, thoroughly as they go, and not at the end when it’s too long to deal with. Enforcing this tends to keep pieces much shorter too, emphasising quality and accuracy over quantity. I want them to have the habit of re-reading after writing just a few sentences, reshaping and improving frequently and regularly. Why write a second paragraph at all if the first needs serious reworking?
3. From a couple of pages of past work, I can work out roughly how many full stops/capital letters are missed, typically, in each student’s work. For example,
– nearly all of them!
– 3-4 a paragraph
– just 1 or 2 a page
At the end of a piece of writing, I ask students to proofread, remembering what we’ve worked out about their own punctuation habits. We agree that it’s common to stop proofreading too easily and so they have to apply a little pretend dialogue that I want them to say in their head every time they write something, ideally in other subjects too. It goes like this:
“So you’ve finished have you?
Yes.
But remember you usually miss ______ full stops and at least as many capital letters out every paragraph.
I know. I’ve checked.
But remember, even when you say you’ve checked, Miss finds at least another ____!
Ok I’ll check again and try really hard to find _____ more.”
They laugh, are embarrassed to say it and think I’m strange but it’s memorable. This way, they aren’t thinking ‘Have I missed any out?’ as they proof, they’re thinking ‘I know I miss at least 2 a paragraph; where are they?’
It doesn’t mean they punctuate perfectly, but it does mean they punctuate at least a little more than they did before.
4. For punctuation practice specifically, I set short passages of writing and, ideally, do it often – though never as often as I’d like. We agree how many sentences will be written in advance and so how many full stops (or full stop alternatives ? ! 😉 and capital letters will be needed. This seems to set them off on a better track from the outset, and, again, they punctuate more, if not perfectly.
5. Another strategy that seems to work is an attempt to isolate thinking about punctuation while writing. I put students into pairs of similar punctuating ability. This is not a precise science, and sometimes I do mix it up.
One child writes a short passage of information or description, something simple so that they don’t get writer’s block and spend too long thinking and not writing.
Child 2 watches closely as child 1 writes, on punctuation lookout – they are the ‘punctuation alarm’.
As child 1 writes and misses a full stop and/or capital letter, child 2 gets to beep (humorously but not too loudly – it can get raucous, or they make each other jump!) and then ‘teach’ child 1 what punctuation is required.
If Child 2 thinks of an alternative way to punctuate a sentence, they can also sound the alarm more gently and then explain.
Child 2 can appeal and they should discuss whether or not the punctuation is required/desirable.
I circulate and act as referee. If I have very accurate punctuators in a class I ask them to circulate and act as extra referees and offer advice for alternative punctuation where they can too.
I demonstrate all this at the front of the class first. I write and deliberately miss punctuation but pretend I’m doing it by accident and the children can beep when they think they’ve spotted something I’ve missed or something that could be improved.
My reasoning is that
– child 1 tries harder than usual to avoid the punctuation alarm and so is more alert to the issue of punctuation actually in the act of writing rather than just at the end (though content may suffer as a consequence but that’s not the focus so it doesn’t matter so much),
– child 2 gets to concentrate solely on punctuation because someone else is producing the content
– and both children get to discuss punctuation rules and choices of style, which, even for already able punctuators is stretching.
I keep it short so it doesn’t get out of hand. I mix up the pairs often.
It’s more fun 🙂 than a punctuation worksheet – but that doesn’t mean they learn more, of course! I haven’t proved that definitively, but it does seem to heighten their awareness and increase their attention to the issue.
6. This could be done during a longer piece of writing. For example, let students get started individually and self-edit as they go. For the third paragraph, say, you could then put Punctuation Alarm in to practice as above. They’ll already be up and running with the writing and so the content should flow a little more easily. It will shift the focus to punctuation just for a short time during the process of writing a longer piece.
7. When marking, rather than circling missing or incorrect punctuation, I say how many are missing or incorrect in a particular section (e.g. 5 missing full stops (or alternatives), 7 missing capital letters in 2 highlighted paragraphs) and ask the student to find them all. Then I make sure that I give them time to do just that. This process helps to inform what we know about their punctuation patterns and habits – what and how many they tend to miss and so what and how many they need to deliberately try to find when editing.
Great piece. I feel today’s texting world that young people inhabit also makes it an even more difficult to embed once past the KS1
I think this article is capital!
This underscores the need for:
(1) practice that is *deliberate*, not merely the accidental practice that happens when a skill is used repeatedly
(2) early and rapid feedback, to catch and correct errors
This is a huge issue in math education. I cannot count the number of times educationists (like Jo Boaler) have insisted that there is no need to practice the times tables because kids will just end up remembering them “in their own time” as they use the math facts over and over. Actually experience says otherwise, and the lack of deliberate practice leads to habits that clutter the mind and prevent forward movement in mathematical work after a certain level of complexity.
[…] problem is the embedding of bad habits through poorly constructed writing practice. I call this the capital letter problem. Children often know that their writing is inaccurate or clunky. They know they should use capital […]