Spelling and punctuation — the quiet marks

Why these are worth the time

Comprehension gets the attention, but spelling, punctuation and grammar carry marks too — and unlike comprehension, they are largely rule-based. That makes them learnable in a way that "understanding a passage" is not.

If a child's practice shows English weaker than Maths, this is very often where it actually sits.

Apostrophes: two jobs, endlessly confused

Apostrophes do exactly two things, and almost every error comes from mixing them up:

Missing letters. do not becomes don't; it is becomes it's.
Belonging. the girl's bag is one girl; the girls' bags is several.

The one worth drilling is its against it's. It's always means it is or it has — if the sentence does not work when expanded, it is its. That single test settles most of them.

Commas: the ones that actually appear

Comma rules can be taught endlessly, but a few cover most questions:

Separating items in a list.
After an opening phrase — After the match, they went home.
Around an aside that could be lifted out — My brother, who is eleven, plays football.

Reading a sentence aloud helps: a comma usually sits where a speaker would naturally pause.

Common spelling traps

Words that sound the same: there / their / they're, to / too / two, were / where / we're.
Doubling before an ending: running, stopped, bigger.
Plurals that change: knives, children, stories.
The words nearly everyone gets wrong once: separate, definitely, because, believe.

How to practise without it becoming a chore

Five or ten minutes is plenty. Work on one rule at a time until it holds, rather than a scattering of everything.

The most useful source of words is your child's own mistakes. A short list of words they have got wrong, revisited a few days later and again a week after that, beats any generic list — because the spacing is what moves them into memory, and the words are ones that actually trip them up.

Watch the sub-topic, not the subject

"English is weak" is not actionable. Apostrophes are weak is. If your practice shows accuracy by sub-topic, use it — three focused sessions on the one weak rule will do more than three weeks of general English work.

Common questions

How many marks are spelling and punctuation worth?

In the English half of each paper, spelling and punctuation together account for ten of the twenty-eight questions. That is a substantial block of marks, and unlike comprehension it is almost entirely learnable through practice on known rules. It is the most reliably recoverable ground in the paper.

How is spelling tested in the Transfer Test?

A sentence is divided into four segments and the child identifies which segment contains the misspelling, with 'no mistake' available as a fifth option. This is a proofreading task rather than a writing one, so a child who spells well in their own writing can still lose marks by not scanning carefully.

What is the fastest way to pick up spelling and punctuation marks?

Work on categories rather than individual words. Errors cluster into a small number of patterns, such as suffix rules, silent letters, apostrophes and comma use, and fixing a pattern fixes every word that follows it. This is why sub-topic level reporting matters more here than an overall percentage.