Discussion Forum
This is a forum to discuss the gray areas of the English language for which you would not find answers easily in dictionaries or other reference books.
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Latest Posts : Misc
You folks could probably answer this question better than anyone else I can think of. Is there any evidence that computer spell checkers help improve peoples’ unaided spelling skills? I ask because I believe it has helped mine. The immediate feedback offered as I type on a word processor seems to break any tendency I might have to start spelling certain words wrong all of the time.
No doubt there are educators, psychologists, and others who would argue that a spell checker makes us lazy and without the spell checker on the system we would soon regress to our primitive spelling roots. Maybe they’re right and my improved spelling is just a figment of my imagination, or perhaps a natural tendency that would have happened anyway after many years of writing.
A friend asked me, “how many thats can you have in a row?” If a sentence has two thats in it, you could say, “Delete this that, not that that.” (That’s two in a row.) And, he could ask, “Is that that that that you want me to delete?” There’s four, can any more make sense?
Although technically the phrase “hang glide” is two words it seems to be used as one - as in hang gliding.
So what on earth is the past tense of hang glide? Hang glided?
For a normal bibliography entry for an internet resource, one must include the author’s name, title of site, date of document, date of access, and of course the URL.
What happens if my resource is the excellent Wikipedia? A site that I do not know the original author of the article or the date the article was published? Would I have to leave all the info I don’t know blank, or add “Not Applicable?”
Also, if most of my references are from different articles (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Copernicus etc) but from the same website (Wikipedia) do they have to be seperate or listed all in the same entry?
When using numbers in a sentence to express a percentage, such as sixty-six and two-thirds percent, is it proper to use a hyphen between “66″ and “2/3″ or just a space?
Is there a set rule to capitalizing certain words in any given title (such as a book)? For example:
“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
In that title, one doesn’t capitalize ‘the’ or ‘and’ (not counting the first). Which words should you NOT capitalize in a title? I once asked my English teacher, and she told me to capitalize the “little” words. o__o Can someone clarify that for me...?
For instance, a song:
“Here With You”
Would ‘with’ be capitalized or not? I consider that to be a relatively ‘small’ word...
Is anyone else alarmed by the linguistic nonsense spouted by the newly formed Society for the Preservation of English and Correct Speech? Any comments regarding what they say about grammar, usage and the like would be welcome.
Sentence in question: “The coursework for this assignment is differentiated and dependent on grade level and ELA designation.”
on or upon? Does it matter? Does it ever matter?
Which statement is correct?
1. The patient has never undergone a colonoscopy.
2. The patient has never underwent a colonoscopy.
Since when does colo=ker. For the word ‘colonel’ we say “kernel,” but we don’t say “kerol” for the word ‘color.’ Its just a total disregard for any spelling rules whatsoever.
