Grammar and Language Workbook

Place a check beside each sentence that uses parentheses, brackets, and ellipsis
points correctly.
✔
“Martin [Luther King Jr.] knew that character and ability are formed in the home . . . ,”
Colin Powell has written, “and in the school.”
Unit 12, Punctuation, Abbreviations, and Numbers
269
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Name ___________________________________________________ Class _________ Date ____________________
Mechanics

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1. Colin Powell (the future chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff) was born in New
York to Jamaican immigrant parents on April 5, 1937. 
2. His father worked long hours (as a clerk in a shipping company;) his mother also
worked, as a seamstress.
3. Colin Powell recalls his childhood as a happy one, although his neighborhood of Hunt’s
Point (in New York’s South Bronx) has since become impoverished.
4. Hunt’s Point was a relatively prosperous working-class neighborhood of blacks (many,
like the Powells, of West Indian descent), Latinos, Jews, and other ethnic groups.
5. On several occasions he has said, “[Hunt’s Point] was a neat place to grow up.”
6. “Growing up in New York,” Powell wrote in 1988, “everybody was a minority...I did
not know what a majority was.”
7. The young Colin Powell worked part-time in a store owned by a Jewish family, and
there he learned to speak some Yiddish (the language of eastern European Jews [from
the old German word for Jewish]).
8. The Powells attended St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church (The Episcopal Church is the
national church of England and was the church of most Jamaicans.).
9. Colin Powell was able to avoid the many dangers that were beginning to infect the
South Bronx (drug use, crime, and poverty,) thanks to his strong, supportive family.
10. Among his cousins are several state and federal judges, an ambassador to Sierra Leone
(a country in west Africa), a psychologist, two Oxford graduates, a leading aerospace
engineer, and one of the nation’s richest African-American businessmen.