8th grade punctuation worksheets

A real sample sheet.

Five punctuation skills at 8th grade, one sheet each, free with its answer key: commas between coordinate adjectives, commas for extra detail, hyphens, and more.

Every sheet on this page was added on or after Sep 28. See what else is new

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  • Commas between coordinate adjectives Two adjectives that could swap places, or that sound right with and between them, need a comma. Otherwise they do not.
  • Commas for extra detail Extra information rides in the sentence wrapped in commas: My bike, which has a bell, lives on the porch. Lift it out and you still know which bike.
  • Hyphens When two or more words work together as one describing word in front of a noun, join them with hyphens: a ten-minute break. Self-, ex- and all- always take a hyphen, and so do the numbers twenty-one to ninety-nine.
  • Semicolons and colons A semicolon joins two sentences that could stand alone. A colon introduces what comes next: a list, an example, a name, or a sentence that explains the first one.
  • The dash and the ellipsis A dash marks a sudden break or sets off a list that renames something. An ellipsis shows that speech or writing trailed off.

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