The Everything Spanish Grammar Book: All The Rules You Need To Master Espanol (Everything®) (35 page)

C
HAPTER
18
Writing in Spanish

PART OF BEING PROFICIENT in a language is being able to write in it. This means being able to spell correctly, knowing the rules of capitalization and punctuation, and knowing how to proofread your work—dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so to speak.

Don’t Overcapitalize

Overall, the rules of capitalization are very similar in English and in Spanish. Capitalization is used in three basic ways:

1. To indicate the beginning of a sentence.

2. To distinguish proper names.

3. In titles of books, movies, lectures, and so on; in headers.

QUESTION?

The first rule should be pretty clear. Be sure to capitalize the first word of every new sentence, just as you do in English.

Proper Names

The second rule, which deals with proper names, is also pretty similar in English and in Spanish. Names of people, cities, and countries are capitalized in both languages:

Me llamo Benicio Juan Armandez.

My name is Benicio Juan Armandez.

Vivo en Buenos Aires, la capital de Argentina.

I live in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.

Brand names are also considered proper names:

Prefiero las zapatillas de deportes marca Nike.

I prefer Nike sneakers.

Titles and Headers

However, the third rule of capitalization isn’t exactly identical in English and Spanish. In English, we generally capitalize most of the words in a title or header (the exceptions being prepositions shorter than six letters and articles, although these rules may vary). In Spanish, only the first word of the header or title is capitalized:

El autor de la novela
Cien años de soledad
es Gabriel García Márquez.

The author of the novel
A Hundred Years of Solitude
is Gabriel García Márquez.

El primer capítulo de este libro se llama “Bienvenidos al mundo
del idioma castellano”.

The first chapter of this book is called “Welcome to the World of Spanish.”

¿Has visto la película
Tráfico?

Have you seen the movie
Traffic?

That’s All for Spanish

This pretty much takes care of capitalization in Spanish. Although we have additional capitalization rules in English, none of them apply in Spanish.

Days of the Week

In Spanish, the days of the week are written in lowercase letters:
lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo
(Monday, Tuesday, and so on).

Months of the Year

The same is true of the twelve months of the year:
enero,
febrero, marzo, abril, mayo, junio, julio, agosto, septiembre,
octubre, noviembre, diciembre
(January, February, and so on).

FACT

Languages and Nationality

It is unnecessary to capitalize languages and nationalities:

Yo soy rusa. Hablo ruso, inglés y castellano.

I am Russian. I speak Russian, English, and Spanish.

¿Se habla francés en Canadá?

Is French spoken in Canada?

Religious Denominations

Finally, don’t worry about capitalizing names of religions:

Soy judía; mi religión es judaísmo.

I am Jewish; my religion is Judaism.

La religión más común entre los latinos es el catolicismo.

The most common religion among Latinos is Catholicism.

The Rules of Punctuation

As with capitalization, the general rules of punctuation in Spanish are not very different from the rules in English. The punctuation signs in use are pretty much the same:

•
El punto
(period) is used to mark the end of the sentence.

•
La coma
(comma) has a variety of uses, such as separating a series of like terms, except when the comma precedes the conjunctions
y, e, o,
and
u
•
Dos puntos
(colon) is used to introduce a point or a series of terms.

•
Punto y coma
(semicolon) is used to separate independent clauses.

•
El guión
(dash, hyphen) has the same applications in English and in Spanish, but it has an additional use in Spanish.

•
Los signos de interrogación
(question marks) are used to indicate questions. The difference, as you might remember from Chapter 16, is that you need two question marks to enclose the question.

•
Los signos de exclamación
(exclamation marks) are used to indicate exclamations. You need two exclamation marks to enclose the exclamation.

•
Comillas
(quotation marks) are used in Spanish only in the case of highlighting a word, phrase, or a quote; they’re not used to indicate dialogue.

The major difference between English and Spanish pronunciation is punctuating words of dialogue. Instead of quotation marks, a dash is used in Spanish to indicate the start of dialogue. Furthermore, there’s no rule that each speaker’s words are separated by a hard return. Take a look at the following example:

—Estoy tan cansado— dijo Ramón. —Vamos a descansar por
un rato— respondió Elena.

“I am so tired,” said Ramon.

“Let’s rest a while,” responded Elena.

Another difference is that commas and periods are placed outside of quotation marks, unless these punctuation marks are a part of the original quote:
. . . “ejemplo”, . . . “ejemplo”.

The final difference is the use of the comma and period in decimals and numerals with more than three digits. In Spanish, the usage is inverted so that decimal points are separated with a comma and numerals with more than three digits are separated by periods:

Two thousand = 2.000

Two and a quarter = 2,25

When in Doubt—Look It Up

If you plan to write on your PC or Mac, there’s good news—you can probably switch your language option to Spanish and your word processing program may even provide you with a spell checker and a grammar checker. Even if it’s not already installed on your computer, you can probably download good software online.

The extra effort is definitely worth it. The software can help you catch mistakes so that next time you’ll do it right the first time. However, don’t forget that no program is perfect—it’s meant to be a good resource, but you shouldn’t accept all the corrections without question. As in English, you still have to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong. A spell checker will not catch you misusing a Spanish word—it can only catch misspellings. Similarly, a grammar checker may point out a commonly misused grammatical construction that you used correctly. Trust yourself to know which mistakes are really mistakes.

ESSENTIAL

And when you are in doubt, double-check yourself. In addition to this book, there are many other resources you can rely on. If you feel uncomfortable with verb conjugations, invest in
The
Everything
^®
Spanish Verb Book.
And make sure you have a good Spanish to English/English to Spanish dictionary with detailed entries, like
The Oxford Spanish Dictionary
or the
Larousse
Standard Dictionary: Spanish-English/English-Spanish.

You can also take advantage of online resources.
Wordreference.com
provides online dictionaries for Spanish, English, and a host of other languages. Verb conjugation help is also available online, but be sure that you’re using a reputable Web site that is not full of mistakes and misinformation.

Accent Marks, Ñ, and Other Symbols

If you can switch to Spanish in your word processing software, it may auto-correct you when you type by adding the right Spanish symbols as appropriate—the accent marks over vowels, the tilde (that squiggly mark over the soft “n”), and even upside-down question marks and exclamation marks (¿ and ¡). Test it out and see if it works. For questions and exclamations, try starting with a regular question mark or exclamation mark—the symbol should flip upside-down automatically.

If you don’t have Spanish as a language option, or if your paper is mostly in English but requires the use of Spanish passages, you’ll need to learn the shortcuts for inserting the right symbols and accents as you type.

On a PC

One way to insert accent marks, ñ, ¿, and ¡ is by using the Symbol menu usually found on the toolbar under the Tools category. Scroll down to find the right symbol, click on it, and press Insert. You’ll see it appear in the document.

Another option is to use a series of shortcut key strokes. To add an accent mark, first press down and release two keys:
Control
+
’
(apostrophe). Then type in the vowel that you wish to accent: a, e, i, o, or u. To key in ñ, press down
Control
+
~
(this is actually three keys, since
~
is a combination of
Shift
+
`
). Release and type in “n.” If á, é, í, ó, ú, or ñ are capital letters, use Shift when you type a, e, i, o, u, or n.

To add an upside-down question mark, use the following key strokes:
Shift
+
Control
+
Alt
+
?
If you need an upside-down exclamation mark, type in
Shift
+
Control
+
Alt
+
!
And there’s more good news—if you don’t like these shortcuts, you may be able to make your own. Go back to that Symbol window and poke around.

On a Mac

If you’re using the Mac version of Microsoft Word, the Symbol menu is pretty much identical—just look under Tools. But if you’d like to use the shortcut key strokes, they’re slightly different.

To add an accent mark to a vowel, hold down
Option
+
e;
release, then type in the vowel that needs the accent—a, e, i, o, or u. Again, if the accented vowel is a capital letter, add the
Shift
key to the second step. To insert “ñ,” simply type in
Option
+
n
(or
Option
+
Shift
+
n
to get Ñ).

And adding ¿ and ¡ is even easier. To get the upside-down question mark, type in
Option
+
?
For the upside-down exclamation mark, use
Option
+
1.