This month, we turn to local news for a discussion on education and inequality. The Straits Times carried an opinion piece in June arguing a case for setting aside a quota for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but who are also academically bright. Some questions to consider:

· What are the advantages of implementing a quota system, or affirmative action, in top schools?

· Is a quota system for the needy a fair and viable solution to address the problem of inequality?

· What other ways can you think of to address the issue of poor academic performance among children from needy families?

The conventions and punctuation rules surrounding the use of dialogue is a great source of confusion for many students. Although it is good not to have excessive dialogue in a narrative composition, it is equally important to be aware of how to punctuate dialogue properly when the use of dialogue is required. Generally,

· Regardless of where it begins in the sentence, dialogue begins with a capitalised word.

· After a dialogue, the dialogue tag will be in lower case, unless it begins with a name.

· Dialogue must always be kept within inverted commas.
· A separate paragraph is needed for dialogue.

Rules for Punctuating Dialogue

· Dialogue and dialogue tags are separated by a comma.

· All punctuation marks in dialogue must be inside the inverted commas. Exceptions to this rule are very rare; students are not expected to know these exceptions at PSLE.

Let’s see some examples of proper punctuation in dialogue:

(A) “Mrs Lim asked me to report to the general office,” Mikaela said. (note placement of comma)
(B) Dionne asked, “Did you eat all my cookies?”
(C) Cameron blurted, “Oh no! I left my calculator in the examination hall!”
(D) “When did Albert become so good at singing?” asked Celine.
(E) “I don’t want to go to that party!” he exclaimed.

It helps to remember that a piece of dialogue is not a complete sentence even when it has a terminal punctuation mark e.g. question marks and exclamation marks. This explains why we use a comma to separate dialogue from dialogue tags. It also explains why the dialogue tag does not begin with a capital letter, except for names. 

For example:
"Could you pass the salt please?" said Mrs Lim to her daughter.
"Could you pass the salt please?" Mrs Lim asked her daughter.