Posted by "GrrlScientist" on September 26, 2006 You’ll find a few items in this quiz that are correct according to British grammarians, but are incorrect according to American grammarians. To take the test and to see my score, see below the fold.
| Your English Skills: |
 Grammar: 100% Punctuation: 100% Spelling: 100% Vocabulary: 100% |
Wow! I need to go back to school! Grammar 100-Vocabulary 100-Punctuation 40-Spelling 20!!! Good thing I have spell check!
English wernt never my goodest subject – espeshally speling.
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Your English Skills: |
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Vocabulary: 100% Grammar: 80% Punctuation: 80% Spelling: 40% |
I was once having lunch with some English language lecturers, and they were discussing how some of them were “heavy punctuators”. It was great to hear that even the professionals don’t agree.
This is, of course, merely an excuse for getting such embarrassingly low marks.
Bob
Speelling.
Grammar: 100%
Punctuation: 100%
Vocabulary: 100%
Spelling: 20%
I got 100% on everything but hesitated about question 14. It looked so easy I thought it was a trap and went for the comma before the marks, so technically I failed that one.
I quibble about the grammar: two of those questions are correct in both variants depending on what you mean. But 100s all around.
Janne – you were lucky there weren’t any questions about the use of the word “the”. (I’m assuming you’re Finnish with a name like that).
Bob
Bob, “the” is no problem for me – I’m Swedish, actually, though with Finnish ancestry, hence the two prior lanugages.
The correct use of the comma still eludes me however, in English or Swedish. That and an unfortunate tendency not to use proper contractions in written English (I use “I am”, “they are” instead of “I’m”, “they’re” and so on).
I take issue with the creator of the quiz over Q.14.
Unless the comma is part of the song name, it should not be inside the speech marks. Isn’t the point of speech marks to delimit verbatim quotation from original work?
It becomes even more obvious when you consider the following two sentences:
One could write “Type ‘ls’ to find out the names of the files in the current directory” and thereby dodge the issue; but this will not work in every situation.
As an old-skool hacker, I have my own theory on under- vs. over-punctuation. When using fixed spacing (as on a VT220-type text terminal — remember them?) rather than proportional spacing, punctuation marks have a more apparent “cost”. I would hazard a guess that under-punctuation would tend to be more common in fixed-spaced media and over-punctuation more common in proportionally-spaced media.
I have seen text cluttered with unnecessary punctuation marks, and at the other extreme I have seen text whose meaning was ambiguous for want of punctuation. Rarely if ever has the difference been a single punctuation mark.
The comma inside the quotation marks is correct in American grammar. You put the comma or period at the end of a clause, but before the quotation marks.
e.g., Lydia decides to “treat” Jane and Elizabeth to lunch, but realizes she has no money, for she has spent it all on an unattractive bonnet she thought she “might as well buy as not.”
The only time you don’t (again, in American grammar) is when you are citing a source, or a page number.
e.g., Lydia decides to “treat” Jane and Elizabeth to lunch, but realizes she has no money, for she has spent it all on an unattractive bonnet she thought she “might as well buy as not” (197).
And even then, the location of the parentheses is debated – all four of my English teachers in high school wanted us to cite page numbers differently.
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 27, 2006
October 1, 2006
October 3, 2006