The English Miscellany

Today I am sharing the FURTHER READING list published in my book The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences (Quibble Academic 2013): Amidon, Arlene. "Children's understanding of sentences with contingent relations: Why are temporal and conditional connectives so difficult?" Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 22.3 (1976): 423-437. Astington, Janet Wilde, Janette Pelletier, and Bruce Homer. "Theory of mind and epistemological development: The relation between children's second-order false-belief understanding and their ability to reason about evidence." New Ideas in Psychology 20.2 (2002): 131-144. Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer . Vintage, 2011. Baker, Linda. "Comprehension monitoring: Identifying and coping with text confusions." Journal of Literacy Research 11.4 (1979): 365-374. Bates, Elisabeth, Philip S. Dale, and Donna Thal. &quo

Use the words in bold to fill in the gaps: 1. They were _________ delighted with the concert; at the end of the evening they applauded___________. 2. Sinners do not listen to the ___________ of preachers. 3. I am not _________ to drinking brandy in _________weather conditions. 4. Tourists are not __________ to walk on the lawn in the quadrangle. 5. I _________ you to refrain from ringing the alarm bell. 6. How will you   _______ a change in his behaviour? 7. I am pleased to _________ your confessions, _________ the one concerning murder. Accept         Advice                  Allowed       Advise        All together Averse        Altogether             Effect                     Adverse       Except 8. The chairman_________ the rowdy members of the committee. 9. I would like to___________ your opinion on the nomination of a new president. Have you had time to __________the quality of the applications submitted? 10. The pain

A selection of some of the curious quotations included in my new book, The Art of Connection . ‘After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once;’ (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , 1865) ‘At present, we may truly be thankful that a reform in this matter has commenced.’ (Albert Day, Methomania: A treatise on Alcoholic Poisoning , 1867) ‘Before I dismiss the uses of architecture, and indeed of the Arts generally, I cannot but dwell for a moment on the amazing effects they have had, on the labour and mechanical skill of our country.’ (Henry Dilworth Gilpin, An annual discourse before the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts , 1827) ‘But finally they lost patience, seeing that their reformatory efforts went for nothing, and threw both friends and strangers overboard.’ (Mark Twain, What is Man? and Other Essays , 1906) ‘Forthwith he made the well his objective. In that country wells were not plentiful

Further to my recent post examining the effectiveness of software designed to assist with grammar, punctuation, and style, I wanted to find out whether it was possible to score 100% on the grammarly.com software. I tried to test www.grammarly.com by using text taken from their own website. That does not work, however, as they recognize their own work and they have already marked it as 'perfection.' They award themselves 100% for their own work. Is that surprising? Nonetheless, if we select text from www.grammarcheck.net, their text has a variety of errors - according  to www.grammarly.com. Similarly, text taken from the  www.grammarly.com website fares badly when it is tested by www.grammarcheck.net. These results suggest that the software programmes have not managed to create a reliable and universal system that successfully tests and verifies grammar, style and punctuation. Whichever system is used there is a typical 35% reporting of errors in the text submitted. Cl