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PrimaryEnglish

7 grammar gremlins that you’re passing on to pupils

A devil-may-care approach to the English language may bring charm to personal communications but could seriously hurt your students’ marks, says Anna Blewett…

Anna Blewett
by Anna Blewett
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PrimaryEnglish

Could you tell a catenative verb from a circumstantial clause at 20 paces? Or spot a prepositional adjective if it poked you in the eye? No? Well that’s deeply unfortunate since the exam boards now have poor grammar well and truly in their crosshairs.

Once the sole concern of English teachers, these days shoddy sentence structure and a scrappy grasp of language are everyone’s business. If your department isn’t in the trenches fighting the death of grammar (or the #deathofgrammer as Hollywood heartthrob Rob Lowe once termed it, sparking an ironic tweetstorm on the possible demise of Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer), you can kiss goodbye to valuable marks. The pedants are taking over the asylum, so if any of the following common errors look uncomfortably familiar from your own work, it’s probably time for some seriously focused CPD…

1 | Crappy commas

If your one main criticism of your students’ essays is that they don’t make any flipping sense, allow us to present a nickel-plated bullet: the correctly-placed comma. Often deployed erroneously to appalling effect – check your own notes for details – the comma has four clear uses. First is the construction of a list: the pursuit of a football within a marked boundary is tiring, demoralising, and ultimately pointless. (Note that the second comma, the ‘Oxford comma’ made famous by Vampire Weekend, is optional). Next, it can be used to join two related statements if followed by a suitable linking word such as ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘yet’. Van Gogh made a bloody idiot of himself over that ear business, yet tea towels of his Sunflowers continue to sell.

Thirdly commas can replace words missed out to avoid needless repetition: some opt for a mortise and tenon joint to connect adjoining woods at right angles; others, whatever Ikea is happy to suggest. Finally comes the bracketing comma to separate out a slight aside: the value of N, which I’d have got straight away if someone had bothered to include the relevant facts, can be expressed as y(2+1).

2 | Tautological waffle

“Forest have now lost six matches without winning,” was one of dearly departed sports reporter David Coleman’s classic utterances. “He’s 31 this year – last year he was 30,” is another. National icon indeed. Similar examples of tautology, the pointless repetition of a statement in a different arrangement of words, are common among live action commentators trying to fill the unforgiving minute, inspiration-strapped essayists grasping at a word count and, ahem, less than focused teachers. Such behaviour may not make an answer technically incorrect, but it fudges a point and may just contribute to the examiner’s impression that they’re dealing with a hopeless simpleton.

3 | Coulda, woulda, shoulda

A history teacher known to this magazine used to grade students’ essays A, B, C, D or BK. The latter predicted a career in Burger King, and was instantly applied to examples of our next problem. Horribly easy but easily the most horrible thing to encounter in a formal piece of writing, mistakes heard in spoken English regularly make it onto the page. Romeo is literally blown away by Juliet’s beauty. Figuratively perhaps – but even Baz Luhrman’s retelling leaves the lovestruck hero in place until the final scene. Another classic: ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’. Beethoven could of made a fortune if he’d thought to trademark his name before it was applied to a cinematic series about a St Bernard. Could he? Tragically, we’ll never know. Insist pupils use ‘have’; and make sure you do, too.

4 | Dodgy word selection

Betsy DeVos, US secretary of education, proved her eminent suitability for Donald Trump’s administration when tweeting her excitement at attending his “historical” inauguration. While such displays of ignorance (‘historic’ was the term eluding her) may be positively welcomed by incumbents at the White House, examiners and employers will take a dim view so it’s worth addressing some common mistakes. ‘Compares with’ is generally used when assessing the differences between two subjects: Gary Lineker’s Match of the Day is a bleak, bewilderingly charmless show compared with Des Lynam’s incarnation. ‘Compares to’ looks at similarities; think of that teardrop rolling down Sinead O’Connor’s perfectly powered face as she belts out “Nothing compares to you.”

And unless you want markers to pull a Jeremy Paxman sneer as they flick through your pupils’ papers, remember that fewer is for objects referred to in the plural, less is appropriate when talking about something with no plural form. There were fewer hospitalisations after Year 9’s summer production this year, but then there was less angst in the drama department than previously.

5 | Apostrophic catastrophes

Scan through your late-night Facebook posts for the last six months; if you can’t find a misplaced apostrophe you’re not looking hard enough. Scourge of grocers, tormentor of hurried writers, and more controversial than double denim, this tricksy character has three modes – possessive (teacher’s angst), contractive (it’s gin o’clock can function for it is gin of the clock) and plural in the case of awkward single letters (how many g’s and t’s can one revision session require?).

Simple enough, eh? So you’ll know to move that possessive apostrophe along when dealing with a plural noun already ending in s? Two months’ notice is required when quitting my post so I’ve scheduled my breakdown for August. And try this one on for size: its/it’s. It’s crazy how often you have to rescue a pupil from it’s appalling use of English. **Grammar klaxon** You spotted that the second ‘it’s’ was a foul plant, right? Cos if not you might as well get on with that breakdown now. Never, never, ever allow your classroom to become a breeding ground for apostrophes used on possessive forms of pronouns.

6 | Cod latin

Latin’s great, isn’t it? Carpe diem, and all that; one could almost pretend one went to a selective school. But did you ever think your casual use of Romanisms might have been marking you out as a buffoon all these years? That even the lowliest serf of the extinct Roman empire is turning in their unmarked grave at your botched use of their parent lingo? For their benefit and your own, kindly remind students of the following: if you can’t remember the correct order of etc. (et cetera or ‘and so on’), ie (id est or ‘that is’) or eg (exempli gratia or ‘for example’) it’s best to avoid them entirely. ‘Et al’ is not a random suffix beloved by hoity-toity academics but a reference to the unnamed posse accompanying the named subject of a passage.

7 | Accidentally comedic structuring

A hanging participle, or ‘dangling modifier’ to give its more suggestive name, is regular chortle fodder for self-appointed grammar tsars. This heinous crime – regularly committed by local radio newsreaders and in-flight magazines – occurs when the author splices a dull sentence into a more jazzy form without checking the original meaning is clear. Witness: driving his six wives to distraction, secondary sources show us that Henry VIII’s lute playing was in fact a total shambles. More entertaining examples occur when the jumbling of order means the opening gambit – the ‘participle’ or ‘modifier’ – is incorrectly assigned: Sickly, unhealthy and nutritionally dense, Jamie Oliver says we should all eat less sugar.


Anna Blewett is a freelance journalist, who has never been more uncomfortably aware of Skitt’s Law (look it up).

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