First names? Last names? No names?
I’m just roughing out something on how students and professors/ lecturers at college talk to each other, and am using the VOICE and MICASE online academic corpora for guidance. Dialogues will hardly contain the names of the two partners. You won’t necesessarily need to use the name of the person when you first address them. […]
Grammar Guru: until or by?
You’re going camping and want to borrow a friend’s tent over the weekend. So you say: “Could I have it ______ Friday afternoon? We’re leaving on Friday after work.” Until or by? Until means from now until then. By, used for deadlines, means not later than then. By… at the latest! Imagine: If you said […]
Kleiner, uralter Gott – Ancient little god
In a week we’ll be burying my mother’s ashes on Drummond. We’ve decided to read some of her poems, with a translation into English. She published a volume of them in the Wilhelm Andermann Verlag in Vienna in 1944 when she was 21; a miracle, since paper was so rare towards the end of the […]
Feed the grammar guru
My favorite quote so far at IATEFL: “Do not teach things that are wrong.” That’s Dave Willis. And as he proves in this talk held before a room full of English teachers, it’s easier said than done. We often enough do teach total malarkey, namely as soon as we teach prescriptive grammar rules that don’t […]
Altering Alice
This editing game is more ‘focussed practice’ than ‘game’: Copy the paragraph into “Comments” and change one word. A word may need to be replaced by two words (or several words may have to change together). Make every version meaningful. If someone ahead of you has made a change that you think requires another word […]
Expanding Alice
Come play a game: Copy and paste the last version of the sentence into “Comments” and add a word or phrase to expand the sentence. You can also start a new sentence. Make each version meaningful. Don’t delete anything anyone else has written. Alice in Wonderland. Alice was in Wonderland.
The Onion Radio: Rules Grammar Change
Nonsense rules!
