I tend to agree with the grades being given by the previous posters. Clearly, as CA3799 suggested you had questionable instruction in English in high school or even junior high school (some of the errors like your random capitalization of nouns should have been corrected no later than sixth or possibly seventh grade). Either that or you paid very little attention while in English.
Just in passing, how old are you? I ask this not to belittle you, but rather because for about a decade ending as late as the '90s in some places, there was a style of teaching called “Whole English” which said basically, “Don’t sweat the small stuff like grammar, capitalization, puncutation and spelling, let the students create. They will pick up the details later.”
Unclviny (my super-duper brother), who is 40-ish, went to one of those hippie high schools. The school has a bumper sticker that says “TheHighSchoolForThePerformingAndVisualArts”. I don’t think they placed much emphasis on punctuation.
I know I make my spelling, grammar, and puctuation errors, but I was surprised to see he made so many in that paragraph because I recall that he was required to type in school due to his horrible handwriting (which in turn was caused by an injury yo his writing hand).
“Passengers’ seat” for the seat where one passenger sits?
Talk about the blind leading the blind!
You all need to buy a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage and read it. Failing that, AT LEAST read the grammar section in Elements of Style by the immortal Strunk & White.
Eh…it’s acceptable for plurals of letters or numbers (depending on what style guide you use.) For example, “In the class, there were 25 A’s, 35 B’s, 50 C’s, etc…”
I tend to prefer the use of an unapostrophed “s” for numbers, though. With single letters there can be some confusion.
Well it seems AuntPam has taken us all to task. Yes, I did use the incorrect punctuation when I spelled “Doper’s” as if it were a possessive. :smack:
Actually, it was a possesive. I had typed something such as “I’ll leave the corrections for other Doper’s … opinions … postings” - something like that. I edited that and decided to leave off the ending words - but I didn’t remove the possessive apostrophe. :smack:
But other than that, there aren’t hardly no more grammatical errors in my postings. Irregardless, I shall be vigilant about such things. I should always give my postings a second glance, again, one more time.
I was, initially, going to correct you on doper’s, but then realized that you could have used it elliptically for * doper’s opinions *, and if not, it was a mere typo as you certainly know better.
I had a hard time believing the paragraph posted was truly made as an honest error. The errors don’t even sound like honest errors of someone writing as if they were speaking. Up until now, I’d have thought someone would have to put conscious effort into writing that badly. I have never seen someone juxtapose two punctuation marks (!,). That is an entirely new level of wrong.
Get thee to a copy of Strunk and White, quicklike.
I got the same impression … is the OP not putting us on? Perhaps to spite Ca3799, who may have offered unwanted advice on another missive of unclviny’s?
Can somebody give us a ruling here? Is panache45 correct? I know where he/she’s coming from, in that if you spell “F” phonetically it begins with a vowel, hence the “n”. But IIRC there was a thread about this very subject and the consensus was that the “n” is usually used, because it’s more comfortable, but such usage is not a hard and fast rule.
Actually, I at first used the “n”, but deleted it because I thought it sounded effete.
I bow befire the authority of the resident grammar cops.
It’s definitely “an F” not “a F.” Usages of “a” and “an” is dependent on the pronunciation of the following word, not the spelling. So unless you say “he got a fffffffffffff on the test,” it is most definitely “an F.”
Regarding the controversy over starting a sentence with the word “but”, I am of the opinion that doing so is acceptable only if the word is used to mean “were it not for,” as in “But for the presence of mind of the captain, many lives would have been lost.”
I prefer the following:
Forty-two days later it was destroyed in a horrific accident, so I can’t offer any reliability experience, but that thing was built like a freakin’ tank!
It is more comfortable to say “an F”.
But, if I say "a “F” a few times, thay becomes more comfortable too.
“Gimme a F, gimme a F, gimme a F-F-F.”
Howzat?
barbitu8 I was, initially, going to correct you on doper’s, but then realized that you could have used it elliptically for doper’s opinions , and if not, it was a mere typo as you certainly know better.
Well, there are non-standard forms of English that do occassional use a glottal stop after the indefinite article and a word with an initial vowel. However, the written rule is as I stated. It’s really not that hard to remember. Just listen to how a standard speaker of English would say the phrase outloud:
A UFO (“a you-eff-oh”)
An OPEC meeting (“an oh-pec meeting”)
An "F’ (“an eff.”)
But for the love of God and all that’s holy, don’t learn it from Strunk and White. No. I beg you. You’ll get caught up in their awful fetish for avoiding adjectives and split infinitives. Messrs. Strunk and White are no doubt fine men, but their style advice leaves much to be desired. Don’t fall into that trap.
When you become a good writer, you may break rules from Strunk & White, but I swear by it as an invaluable tool for beginning scribblers wishing to improve their writing immediately.
