Punctuation and pointless humming at the train station

Hello Jihad!

How are you? I hope your week is going well.

Today I went to Sheffield to visit our new External Examiner for the MA TESOL. The External Examiner checks a sample of our students’ work, to make sure that the marks we give at York St John University are fair. All academic programmes in Higher Education must appoint an External Examiner, who is usually working on a similar programme at another university.

I cycled to the train station from home, left my bike at the station and got a train to Sheffield. The train journey took about forty-five minutes. Here is a (large!) map showing the location of the two cities:

I made a short video of York train station while I was waiting for the train. For some reason, I was humming tunelessly all through the filming. The ‘tune’ is about three notes repeated over and over again in different combinations. Oh dear. I didn’t even realise I was doing it. Next time I will either try and keep quiet or say something more interesting!

York train station with tuneless humming in the background

You mentioned in one of your posts that you are interested in improving your punctuation. I looked carefully at your writing for punctuation problems and found very few!

So, based on the paragraph that follows, I have just two comments; one about apostrophes and one about commas.

Jihad wrote:

But have you realised that some international reactions was to some sort childish and showing a great degree of lack of responsibility and even sense towards an epedimic that threats the all humanbeings? Especially, these animal rights defending organisations who condemned the Egyptian authorities disicion to slaughter all pigs as a preemptive action to avoid a swine flu outbreak in Egypt. Very rediulous!!!!

Rachel wrote:

But do you agree that some international reactions were childish and irresponsible, considering that this is an epidemic that threatens all human beings? Especially the animal rights organisations that condemned the Egyptian authorities’ decision to slaughter all pigs as a pre-emptive action against a swine flu outbreak in Egypt. Absolutely ridiculous!!!!

My apostrophe comment may be one you already know: Egyptian authorities’ decision.... because the decision belongs to the (plural) authorities. For a plural nouns which ends in s (for example, authorities), use s’ to mark the possessive form.

My comma comment is a bit more complicated: Especially [no comma] the animal rights organisations… because especially is a focussing adverb (others are: simply, only, just, particularly) and does not need a comma to separate it from the rest of the sentence.

There are many examples in your writing of where you use commas effectively:

My next entry, I promise, will be…. Here you are marking an adjunct (which functions as a comment) off from the rest of the sentence.

Added to that, I’m not sure…. Here you are again marking an adjunct (which functions as a link with the previous sentence) off from the rest of the sentence.

Also, the WHO says…. Again, the comma separates the adjunct (another link with the previous sentence) from the rest of the sentence.

I hope that makes sense. At least more sense than my nonsensical background humming!!!

I noticed that the BBC LE site has an exercise on vocabulary related to swine flu here:

Europe's first swine flu case

OK, that’s all for now. See you again soon!

Rachel

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Comments on the comments:

Jirka (from the Czech Republic) - your question about the difference between that’s OK and it’s OK is a very interesting one! Sometimes either phrase is acceptable, for example:

A: Are you sure it’s no trouble?
B: No, it’s OK or No, that’s OK.

My grammar book suggests that it is often used to refer to a situation and that to refer to a person, object or topic. Let’s listen carefully to the conversations we hear and try to notice when that and/or it is used!

Rabail (from the UK) – all your examples of advice/advise were correct except one, great! The incorrect one was I am planning to take advise from….. I think that I am planning to take advice from..... is better.

Kiran Gautam (from Nepal) – You are quite right to point out that MS Word doesn’t like the passive voice. I’ve noticed this too, but I have no idea why! Does anyone else know? Your example of the passive voice is correct; to use the active voice here (as MS Word suggests) would sound very strange.

Hello to Cristina, Abdisamad Sharif, Ana Paula, Chaikh Vall, Mauricio, Adek – great comments!!

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