Wouldn't it be great if you just knew everything?

Well no-one can..

The good news is that there are strategies for giving the impression you know everything.  This is of particular interest to you as you are coming to a critical period of your life during which you will be tested on nearly everything.

A good way of persuading people that you know a lot is to know details; obscure aspects of a subject.  You will find that if you know things that others do not or that few people do then people will presume you know all the obvious stuff.

Make sense?

Good!

Let's say that you will be required to give the impression that you know all the rules of grammar...on an English exam in a few weeks for example.  A good way of showing some flair would be to include a correct use of the following rule...

Before a word beginning with a silent h you would use the word 'an' and not 'a'.

For example:  I'll be there in an hour

The important thing to remember is that the h should be silent.  A common mistake is to get carried away and start going to 'an horrific incident at an hospital'...which sounds an horrible.

I'd suggest you should actively try and show this skill on your exam.

Common words that should be preceded by 'an'

heiress

heir

hour

honest

honour

Post a few sentences practing this rule.

Prizes available for adding apropriate words to the list.

This week the topic is...

...How to use the ellipsis
The ellipsis (...), sometimes called the suspension or omission marks, has three uses:

• to show that some material has been omitted from a direct quotation [One of Churchill's most famous speeches declaimed: "We shall shall fight them on the beaches ... We shall never surrender".]
• to indicate suspense [The winner is ...]
• to show that a sentence has been left unfinished because it has simply trailed off [Watch this space ...]

Each of you should compose three sentences using an ellipsis in each of the three ways above.

Simples!

Parentheses

Brackets, or parentheses, are often misused by students at GCSE.  

This is not going to be you.

Using the link below to discover their true usage post two sentences using brackets correctly.
You should try to use both methods that the website outlines.

http://correctpunctuation.explicatus.info/punctuation-brackets.htm

Congratulations to the class for so brilliantly completing the last task.  I hope you can all see the purpose and benefit in these posts and that you all continue to contribute.

The semi-colon

Use a semi-colon

to link two separate sentences that are closely related

The children came home today; they had been away for a week.
I only ate one cake for tea; I wish I'd eaten two. 

http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node17.html

http://correctpunctuation.explicatus.info/punctuation-colon.htm

http://www.gcse.com/english/semicolon_use.htm

Each member of 11 AA must post two sentences on this blog that show that they can use a semi-colon correctly.

A random sample of them will be put into a search engine to see if you nicked them off a site.

Feel free to comment on each other's work...nicely.