since people have asked about affect/effect

[basilosaurus]

I think I see that question come up here more often than elsewhere. So, here's a grammar quiz. How well do you think you'll do?

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html#project%3DWORKFAM0619%26articleTabs%3Darticle

And a helpful poster to remember It won't help you with the that/which questions, though.

theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

[brandienee]

I missed 4.

Affect/effect has always stumped me... Ugh. I missed the Principal one too, but that was a spelling issue. (The principal for the school one)

!!Nerd allert!!
The article is fascinating to me, because I have fallen in love with the use of language and Rhetoric. I have a feeling that the poor grammar on the internet is largely based on the fact that people are starting to write how they speak in casual situations. Now that Email and Text messages have come into our lives as our primary mode of communication, we are using "the rules" for speaking in the written world.

[basilosaurus]

But shouldn't people still speak correctly? I understand written communication won't teach you the homonyms, like between principal and principle, but the he and I stuff should be the same. The subject/verb agreement should be the same.

And no one, anywhere, has an excuse for improper use of apostrophe's [sic]. That shit's taught in primary school. Why has the internet caused us to lose that basic lesson?

Did the oatmeal piece help you with affect/effect? Replace it with a verb (they used eat) to see if it makes sense.

[brandienee]

The speaking grammar gets complicated. It doesn't follow the rules of traditional grammar because of all of the different dialects we have within the same languages. It's very tribal. Our goal, (in America) is the use of Standard American English, and the grammar points in it are more consistent with written grammar. If you grew up in North Michigan, Georgia or Boston, you are most likely not speaking this Standard American English accent. And it is easy to judge their grammar, but in their cultures, it is perfectly acceptable... and the rules get blurred.

School teaches us to write Standard American English, not necessarily speak it. What interests me is that it would be logical for the internet communication to follow standard grammar rules, but it doesn't...

[Dumbledork]

I missed four.

I will admit that I speak terribly. I know how I'm supposed say things, most times anyway, I'm just a poor speaker. I slip and stumble over things, say things backwards, etc. I was in speech therapy as a kid, but it never really helped much.

[basilosaurus]

Oh, FFS, I just saw a mistaken "effect" on a tv chyron. You'd think they'd have some sort of professional copy editor when you're broadcasting to so many.

[brandienee]

Jun 29, 2012 20:10:01 GMT -5 basilosaurus said:

Oh, FFS, I just saw a mistaken "effect" on a tv chyron. You'd think they'd have some sort of professional copy editor when you're broadcasting to so many.

HA! No wonder the public is so confused.

[softspot]

I missed 7. :/

[basilosaurus]

Jun 30, 2012 2:45:50 GMT -5 killercupcake said:

Missed 4! My issue was the apostrophes before or after the s. I was confused. Though the "childrens' play" one wasn't very well written, IMO.

That's the issue. it was perfectly written since there is no such word as "childrens" therefore it could never have a possessive form.

[NomadicMama]

Dang, I don't have Adobe. All I have downstairs are Apple products. I'm not going to climb to the third floor, which is considerably warmer than the rest of the house, to fire up the desk top, to take a grammar quiz. But I'm curious!

My sixth grade teacher drilled us on "children's is ALWAYS apostrophe s!". I think it was a personal pet peeve and she did all she could to ensure that her students wrote it correctly!!! Twenty-nine years later, I still remember!

[MrsAggie]

I missed one. That test took me back to TAKS test days.

[meltoine]

Thank God for Mrs. Anderson, my eleventh grade English teacher.

She was the world's most neurotic grammarian and she drilled all of this into us for 12 months straight. beginning in June of the summer before we entered her class. I hated it for the first month, but then I came to understand that sounding like you have a firm grasp on the English language, whether in print or spoken word, is really important.

And I disagree that grammar varies by region in the US. Standard grammar is standard. Mistakes may be more readily accepted in some places, but proper grammar is the same everywhere.

[basilosaurus]

Jul 1, 2012 9:50:41 GMT -5 meltoine said:

And I disagree that grammar varies by region in the US. Standard grammar is standard. Mistakes may be more readily accepted in some places, but proper grammar is the same everywhere.

Thank you. I was trying to say this but wasn't coming up with anything nearly so succinct.

There are different accents, but that does not equal a new dialect with its own distinct rules. Soda vs pop is not a grammatical issue, either. Anyone who says "with he and I" is still making an error, even if everyone around you thinks it's ok.

I am lucky that almost everyone around me in childhood had nearly impeccable grammar. Nuances like that/which might have been wrong, but the big stuff was right. I never really had to learn rules b/c in my case what sounds right actually is usually right. Every teacher I had was also a grammar nut.

I remember a lesson in elementary school where we had to learn the difference between learn and teach. "I'm going to learn you" was so far outside anything I'd ever heard that I wondered who the hell would talk like that. It was just so obvious that it was wildly incorrect. And everyone I was in class with thought the same way.

And then I traveled to the South...

[meltoine]

In my district, we had a lot of kids who spent summers or whole years with their grandparents in the Carolinas and they would always come back saying things like that. I think that's why my teachers (eleventh grade especially, since that was the year most of us took our SATs) harped on it so strongly.

Even in different "dialects" of English (British, Australian, South African, if you even want to call those "dialects") all have the same grammatical rules, though they may use different nouns for the same objects; i.e. stroller and buggy, trunk and boot.