A spelling test!

Hello all! Thanks for your lovely and informative posts Adriana, although I was sorry to hear about all the suicides in your town :-( I’m not sure whether suicide is illegal in the UK or not but I think it is… it’s kind of strange for it to be illegal seeing as they can’t really punish you if it happens. Anyway, I was also sorry to hear about your little bird. It made me think that an alternative title for your post could have been ‘Independence and death’ seeing as he must have been flying freely when the eagle got him.

Not much to report from here I’m afraid. Despite the holiday on Tuesday this feels like it has been a very long week. Unfortunately it ain’t over yet as I’m working tomorrow too. I have to work about one Saturday every two or three months. It’s not so bad though because I get to take a day off in its place afterwards and have a nice long weekend if I'm lucky.

Okay, first of all let’s have a look at those funny old capital letters. Now you asked about the title – with these you can capitalise each of the words if you like, especially when the title is a published title (rather than something like the title to an essay that you’re writing at school). Small words like prepositions, articles and conjunctions normally aren’t capitalised, unless they are the first word in the title. On the other hand, in this context I think it is fine not to capitalise the words in the title if you don’t want to, like in the title of your next blog ‘In the town where I was born - part II’. I’m pretty sure this just comes down to a preference of style but I’m open to hearing from anyone who feels differently!

As for the rest of your answers, you got some of them. Here is the note that I wrote in the last blog:

Remember: capital letters are used for people’s names, names of countries/cities/continents, nationalities, days of the week, and the names of institutions, including hotels and schools.

One of the key words here to notice is nationalities as this seems to be the group of words that you most frequently don’t capitalise. Nationalities are always capitalised. The mistakes you made in the post I was referring to were:

Portuguese
English
Chinese
African
Indian
Sunday
Monday

You also mentioned ‘Capixabas’ and you’re absolutely right – it should also be capitalised as it’s referring to a group of people from a particular place. I notice you’ve made a few more errors with capitals in your most recent posts so try to remember to put a capital letter on all nationalities from now on, and I’ll stop bugging you about it! :-)

The phrases you gave for ‘make’ and ‘do’ are great and correct except for the last one where you’ve used a phrase I notice you’ve used a couple of times now *”I’ve done writing”. Here the error is with the auxiliary verb – what should it be instead? If you’re not sure have a look towards the end of my post called Working Dinners as we discussed using this phrase a few weeks ago.

Yes! You’re right! ‘Close-mouthed’ is a word, I looked it up in my trusty dictionary. According to the definition there it means “not willing to say much because you are trying to keep a secret”. Also, (and this might explain why I hadn’t heard it before) it says it is American English. So there you go! As for ‘speak singing’ I know exactly what you mean but I don’t think we have a phrase like that in English. I think to describe the same thing you’d have to say something like ‘have funny intonation patterns’ or I guess you could also say ‘speak in a sing-song voice’ – yes, that’s probably the closest to what you were trying to say.

Oh yes, one more thing – you explained what you meant by ‘Ola!’ – in English you can call this ‘the wave’ which is just how you described it. You could say something like ‘everybody in the stadium took part in the wave’. To go back to your original sentence, you could say ‘It’s hard to get everyone to do the wave at the stadium’.

Okay, so I have asked you one question already for homework. Now I know I said we might look at past tenses next but I just want to see a couple more examples of your writing before I go into detail about that… meanwhile I thought I’d give you a little spelling test! I’m very glad that you don’t seem to be using a spell check on your computer because this way we can see which words you have difficulty spelling and you can work on learning to spell them the right way, once and for all. Here is a little list of words that you have written that all have errors – can you and our readers try and rewrite them? It might even be helpful to employ the old-fashioned method of writing each one out ten times once you’ve spelled them correctly to help you remember!

1) Responsable
2) Extremelly
3) Papper (i.e. salt and…)
4) Maintainance
5) Benefices
6) Breainstorming
7) Devide
8) Coincidentely
9) Violense
10) Occurences
11) Arguied
12) Terribily
13) Hand-glinding
14) Para-glinding

Right, well my darling husband is again slaving away in the kitchen so I must rush now and make sure he isn’t burning anything. Ha ha only joking, he’s a great cook – I’d better go and help though before he starts thinking I’m not pulling my weight.

Take care everyone and I hope you enjoy your travels Adriana! We’ll look forward to hearing all about them.

Ta-ra for now.

Amy

Here’s the vocabulary before I go…

A riot of a time: a fabulous experience
Self-indulgent: describes something that you do that benefits (often only) yourself
Hunched: sitting or standing with a rounded back, with your head down
Nonsense: ideas or something you say that is untrue or very silly
To put across: to explain/share
Collocation:the way that some words are used or combined together e.g. “black and white” rather than “white and black”
Taxing: demanding, needing a lot of effort

and today’s words:

Preference
To bug someone
Trusty
Once and for all
To employ (check context –there’s more than one meaning!)
To slave away
Must rush
To (not) pull your weight

AND A BRAND NEW FEATURE!

I think it’s high time that our regular readers (including Adriana) reviewed some of the words and phrases that we’ve been learning over the last few weeks, so each blog from now on I’m going to choose five words and make a little list of them for you to test yourselves on whether you know the meaning or not. I’ll put a link in to the definitions in case you need to double check, and remember you can always check the post before to see how they were used… here we go:

1) To use your loaf
2) To get cracking
3) Tricky
4) Regardless
5) Convincing

Check your answers here!

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