I'm not saying nuffink:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22403731

That's a good piece - and I bet he had fun writing it!.

Love this:

"Grammar peevers" in projects such as the Apostrophe Protection Society see "a connection between secure syntax and moral excellence", Hitchings argues. "There's a feeling that if we can maintain grammatical order we can maintain other kinds of order."

So true. And this is why the minute you start testing things, you start making nonsenses:

Linguist David Crystal disagrees. The rules of English grammar are often murky and can be ambiguous, such as in the case of King's Cross, which is written with and without an apostrophe, he argues. The new test has some sensible questions but its insistence on a black-and-white answer is wrong, he says. "It is a turning back of the clock." Bargain shop sign with random apostrophes He highlights one "correct" answer in the test: "We'll need a board, counters and a pair of dice." Placing a comma before the "and" - known as the Oxford comma - would be marked wrong despite being an accepted form of English, he says. "If so, it means the whole output of Oxford University Press is wrong," Crystal says.

<Added>

"Bargain shop sign with random apostrophes"

Talking of random ...

Talking of tests, I won't mention my score.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22512744?sharing=true&score=3+10

And this is why the minute you start testing things, you start making nonsenses

This shall be my motto.

<Added>

I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary." Which of the following is correct?

I still can't work out their reasoning behind the answer to this. Rereading again and again, I don't get it.

Haven't read this yet - will do! But Michael Rosen's tweets on the subject of grammar are brilliant. You should follow him!

<Added>

Oh, I did the test and I am a grammar guru! But how does that test test how well you write English? It just tests that you went to a grammar school probably!

But how does that test test how well you write English? It just tests that you went to a grammar school probably!

Congrats, Jem.

I agree. The test discovered I didn't...

I'd like to introduce you to my sister Clara, who lives in Madrid, to Benedict, my brother who doesn't, and to my only other sibling, Hilary." Which of the following is correct? I still can't work out their reasoning behind the answer to this. Rereading again and again, I don't get it.

I got that one wrong, Sharley, but I could see it afterwards, although I hated the sentence construction and would not have written it myself.

It means that Clara lives in Madrid, then it says "my brother who doesn't", implying there is a brother who does. Whereas if the writer had used a comma: "my brother, who doesn't" then it would have simply meant that while Clara lives in Madrid, Benedict does not.

But I hated the sentence anyway and found it horrible. I wanted to put the comma in after "my brother", assuming the first meaning, but also preferring it as a sentence.

I got 7 in the test, but I probably should have got 8. On one of the questions I was thrown off course from what I would normally have written by overthinking it. What I would have normally written was the correct answer.

Some of that stuff I was never taught at school.

<Added>

Oh, and I went to an "uncreamed comprehensive" in an area without grammar schools.

I only knew it because I did a TEFL qualification and you have to know it because you get awkward advanced students asking you to explain defining and non-defining clauses, which are the bane of a TEFL teacher's life.

I got 2 questions wrong:
-the wretched Clara, Benedict and Hilary question (and yes, I can see the issue now, but frankly, it's a dreadful sentence if we judge it on the clarity of the information it purports to provide)
-the Winston Churchill one. I could see the correct answer, but I was sure I remembered an anecdote about him splitting infinitives and wanting them to stay split, so I decided it must be a trick question (!). Who was that anecdote about, does anyone know?

Jem, I also had a very traditional education in that it focused on 'correct' grammar, but we had a great teacher who always said she was teaching us that stuff so that we could go on to break rules

knowingly and deliberately,

if that suited our purpose, rather than accidentally.



<Added>

Eh? I don't know why a bit of this is in a quotes box - that was completely accidental!

I read that piece on grammar, and did the test. I got 8/10, and also got the brother/sister/sibling question wrong. But I disagree with their correct answer, and still think it's impossible to know whether the "sibling" is male or female, from the context. The other one I fluffed was the one about use of a semi-colon.

I agree completely that English has very imprecise grammar. It's the biggest hurdle that some people have to learning foreign languages, most of which have more precise grammatical rules than English. If someone can't get their head around terms like "verb", "adjective", "adverb" and "preposition", they're really going to struggle. On the other hand, if you learn a foreign language at school, you'll probably learn enough about grammar to answer quizzes like this in English. I always refer back to Russian, when I'm in doubt (about parts of speech or sentence structure, anyway), and once I've worked out how to say the sentence or phrase in that language, I know its detailed structure in English.

The difficulty with translating back from other languages, though, is that they're not structured the same way.

I learnt the basics at junior school, but after that largely by way of French and Latin and briefly Russian and even more briefly Italian... Most of what I know now is self-taught, plus some from being the kind of family that discussed that stuff over meals (My mother is the generation which had to pass a sit-down two-hour paper on grammar to get into Oxford)

For example, English doesn't actually have a verb form for the future tense. We construct future action with auxiliary verbs, so it's no good looking to French or any other for help with that. Same goes for the subjunctive.

"We construct future action with auxiliary verbs"

- yes - and try teaching the difference between

"We're going to McDonald's."
"We'll be going to McDonald."
"We'll go to McDonald's."
"We go to McDonald's."

You need a context in English - always. Hence these grammar rules are bonkers.

Answers -

"Tomorrow."
"tomorrow"
"tomorrow"
"tomorrow".

Supply the context yourselves.

<Added>

I may have spelled/spelt McDonald's incorrectly on one or two occasions but that's not my point.

Now this post I like:

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/writing/online-writer-in-residence/blog/571/

From that blog post:

Shakespeare melted language into a kind of cauldron, conjuring magical transformations. Adjectives become verbs, and often adverbs become nouns, such as when Prospero talks about 'the dark backward' of time. This wasn't 'correct' in any era, but such free magic was probably more likely to happen when correct usage meant what sounded best, rather than adhering to the rules.

Try telling this to someone who is struggling to learn English as a foreign language. As with anything where the rules can sometimes be broken effectively, you need to know the rules before you try bending them. Listen to a non-native speaker struggling to get the words in an English sentence into the correct order. Once you've misunderstood their meaning a few times, due to the word order being wrong, you'll realise that there are, after all, grammatical rules which can't be broken.

A malleable grammar shouldn't be confused with a non-existent one.

A malleable grammar shouldn't be confused with a non-existent one.

Fairynuff.

But I do like this:

There's something inherently snobby about ridiculing market traders about their wrongly-placed apostrophes.

and this:

Lynne Truss said 'don't use commas like a stupid person'. I say, calling people stupid doesn't help their grammar.

and this made me chuckle. Many WWers will understand why:

People who fret that the dash isn't as effective as the semi-colon need to get a life. Or read Byron.

<Added>

This is probably the right moment to confess, I haven't read Byron.