Grammar Nazis...

OK…a debate I have become embroiled in…

I will give you feedback.

I have given my feedback to the politician.

She gave feedback.

They fedback to me.

The gave me feedback.

Are any of these incorrect?

Doh…I think this is the wrong forum…if so, can a passing mod kindly fix it for me?

All of those sentences use feedback as a noun, but then you use “fedback” as a verb. I’ve never heard anyone use “fedback” as a past tense form of feedback and it sticks out to me. “They gave me feedback” would be in line with standard use and with the ways you used it in the other sentences.

Also, I moved this thread to MPSIMS from Great Debates.

Thanks -

Yes you’ve identified exactly what others have said.

I agree the construction of they gave… is better.

However is fedback wrong, or just a little clumsy? I have heard it many places before…most commonly - I fedback to him that his attitude was crappy and argumentative :smiley:

I agree with Marley23. I have never heard anyone use feedback as a verb. “Practice your speech and I will feedback you.” Nope.

If you use “feed” is the verb, e.g., “They fed their comments back to me,” “fed” and “back” are separate words.

A search of the British National Corpus (one of the largest databases of written and spoken English in the world) revealed only seven instances of “fedback”, and it appears to be a technical term, unrelated to the more common definition of feedback.

http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=fedback&mysubmit=Go

(I’m not sure if the above link will work from another computer. If not you can follow my first link to the BNC main page and try “fedback” for yourself.)

If a term is not in the BNC, then it’s probably not in use and/or being used incorrectly.

In the original context, ‘feed back’ is a verb - ‘The stage right monitor is feeding back into the vocal mike.’ The result of this action is ‘feedback’, an uncontrolled and/or unwanted sound from an amplification system. For all that, it’s very rare to hear anyone say ‘The stage right monitor fed back into the vocal mike at last night’s performance.’ It would be much more common to hear ‘The SR monitor was feeding back…’ or ‘The SR monitor was giving feedback…’

I wouldn’t say ‘fed back’ is incorrect but that it isn’t used enough to not sound strange.

fedback should at least either be separate words (fed back) or hyphenated (fed-back)

In electrical engineering “fed back” can be used in in circuitry (e.g. the output of the FET was fed back to input 12) but I’ve only hear “feedback” used as a noun and not a verb.

Even if it were used as a verb, it could become a regular verb with an “ed” past tense. Refer to “fly ball” and “flied out” instead of “flew out.”

Yeah. As a verb, it’s two different words. E.g., “She fed back the answers into the computer.”

And transitive, I would expect. “She fed back to me” is missing an object.

This one is right out.

:wink:

Shakespeare made up words all the time. If you like “fedback”, just use it! I regularly use “genuinity” instead of “genuineness”.