Question

Punctuate the given sentence, where necessary:
“tell me, o muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he sacked the famous town of troy.”
[The Odyssey]
A. NO CHANGE
B. “Tell me, o Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he sacked the famous town of Troy.”
C. “Tell me, OMuse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he sacked the famous town of Troy.”
D. “Tell me, o Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he sacked the famous town of troy.”

Answer 1

Hint: The sentences that we read and study in grammar are made up of a few, specific elements that help in forming the basic meaning of the sentence. We have read and studied about the subject, the object, the verb and the helping verbs that accompany verbs. But there is one more element that, if ignored can make a sentence difficult to comprehend. This element is ‘punctuation’. It is a branch of grammar that deals with the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices.

Complete step by step answer:
1. In order to find the correct option, we have to check each option one by one so that we can detect the correct one.
2. When we look at sentences, we notice their structures, their types, their grammatical constituents and many more things. But, the first thing that we see in the beginning of a sentence is its first letter that is capitalized. We can notice this anywhere. Even in our books we can see this. Thus, according to general rule, the first letter of the first word of a particular sentence must be capitalized. Thus, option A has been proven wrong.
3. Capitalization is done in words that are proper nouns such as names of people, places, things etc. Here, the word ‘Troy’ is described as a town. Thus, it is a proper noun. This makes option D wrong.
4. If we look at options B and D, we can see that the pronoun 'I' and the interjection 'O' are not capitalized. But, in general rule, the former, ‘I’ cannot stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter. Moreover, ‘O’ is used as an exclamatory word and should not be left uncapitalized. This makes options B and D incorrect.
5. When we look at option C, we will notice that it has all the correct punctuation marks and hence this is the right answer.

Thus, Option C is correct.

Note:
To understand the significance of punctuation marks, let us take into consideration the sentence- “alas they lost the match” We can see that it becomes a little hard to read the sentence and it also sounds a bit alone. But, when we add a few things like capital letters, full stops, commas, exclamation marks etc, the whole meaning of the sentence will change. Thus, punctuation marks aid to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud.