I found out this week that I have a lot to learn about writing in English. My new colleagues assume that because I grew up in England, I know the rules of English grammmar and am capable of correcting their papers. To prove how wrong they are (I went to a compriensif skool, tha nos) I took this test on hyphenation and got 70%.
70% in an exam isn't too bad, but leaves enough mistakes. If you extrapolate a 70% success rate to an article several pages long, and include mistakes with commas and capitalisation, then the corrected article almost certainly contain several mistakes.
I am waiting for the first colleague to come and beat me up whilst holding a letter from a Journal saying, "We accept your paper for publication, but maybe you could get a native English speaker to proof-read the article before we publish it."
Of great fun is the "Royal Order of Adjectives", which explains why you drive an old red Italian sports car, and not a Italian red old sports car.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Phil, it's good to see you settling it at the new place - I'll now have to try this grammar test to see how I compare to a native speaker..
Post a Comment