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This is the quiz I just gave my students on additive sentences and quotation mark usage.  One point for a perfect response, .5 point for a partly correct response.  Can you beat their average score of seven out of ten? 

You may PM your answers to me if you like, and I will grade them and post the results here.

 

 

 

Instructions:

Please punctuate each sentence correctly by adding commas, semicolons, and quotation marks.  There will be no need to add/subtract words or capitalize.  Do not rearrange the word order. 

 

1. I won the Super Bowl and had some tea.

 

2. I can’t remember if I robbed the bank today or yesterday.

 

3. I went to high school college and graduate school in St. Louis.

 

4. I have to work late on Fridays but that’s just part of my job.

 

5. Yellow bananas and those weird brown bananas are both half price today.

 

6. I can't draw Arnie said but Ira can.

 

7.  THERE’S A ZOMBIE IN MY BASEMENT! shrieked Doctor Campbell.

 

8. We all felt that you didn’t deserve a promotion however you got one anyway.

 

9.  I may open a bakery next year the neighborhood could use one.

 

10.  I have nothing to offer you but blood sweat and tears you can count on me.

It's really cool that you gave up your tenure to go and teach disadvantaged fourth graders.

As funny as that is, it is going to end up less funny if the cumulative CYS score doesn't crack 5...

Oh, you misunderstand me. I was referring to our site members.

I am scared of doing really badly but i will try to.

I will give actual points to each participant depending on their score.

Send your answers to Gower, don't put them here.

And no comparing notes. If you are approached, snitching is encouraged and will be rewarded.

I’m going to attempt this. I sent my answers to Gower.

I am sending answers to Gower. All of them were typed in notepad to avoid spell check and copied over.

 

I am a bit unsure of my grammar skills without internet/spellcheck help, so we shall see...

I was a bit unsure of if we were allowed to use colons and semi-colons, so I stuck with just commas and quotation marks as much as possible.

Same thing to me I think i did terrible

I am sure you did fine, I am the disadvantaged fourth grader Mizal mentioned.

I  am a grammar foreign student . so we are in a similar situation, but we are both  here to learn.

"Please punctuate each sentence correctly by adding commas, semicolons, and quotation marks." Always carefully read the instructions! Yes, you can use semicolons.
I'll try this too. But far too many of these sentences look like they don't need fixing at all, and this worries me. I must be missing something.

Whoops! I used one colon that should be a semi colon in that case. Reading is usually a strength of mine, I am slipping.

Are we allowed to post our grades here? If so, then I got 9,5 points out of 10, only fucking up at the 5th sentence. Much better than what I thought I'd get!

This only makes my wait for grades back more maddening.

Wait Gower already graded yours?

Edit: Never mind he graded mine too.

Grades:

 

Shadowdrake:  5

Turnipbandit: 5.5

Mara:  6

Lordcarpark:  6

Chris: 7

Castorgreatpoet: 7

Corgi: 7.5

C6H8O6:  7.5

The BrokenGod: 9

Mayana: 9.5

Cricket: 9.5

 

Collectively, you have totally defeated my students.

Hurray! I tied with the Slovenian! XD

Ugh. I knew I should have left a few of those sentences untouched. If you ever do one of these again I’ll remember that.

I need to prove that I am literate.

I wasn't aware we were allowed to leave any of the sentences alone, so I tried punctuating things I thought were correct.  And I got knocked down half a point because I wound up spelling "Fridays" as "Friday's". Guess I should have just copy and pasted things.

Yeah same. For some reason I thought that every sentence had an error somewhere and that we weren’t supposed to leave them alone.

A dangerous assumption, I just, put, commas, everywhere, for this, test.

Putting, commas, everywhere, definitely, is, a, good, strategy. Plus, it’s, really, annoying, to, read.

Ahh this reminds me of my actual grammar skills before I met Gower.

Not that I have imporved much...

Well, I thought that since the directions stated to "Please punctuate each sentence correctly by adding commas, semicolons, and quotation marks" that each sentence had something wrong with it. 

It is fair, if you actually know the subject matter recognizing a correct sentence is part of that.

I did realize that many of the sentences appeared correct. I just thought that the directions were telling me I had to punctuate them anyway. I took the directions literally and looked like a fool because of it. And I own up to that.

I have been defeated, and shall cry in a corner for the remainder of my internet life.

Note that much of this list is ESL and/or twelve. Gower, your students are a disappointment.

What age students does Gower teach?

College.

Oh lol. That’s pretty funny.

My writing students this year are excellent so far.  They've really impressed me.  Grammar stuff is always a challenge, but in terms of straight-up interesting writing, they are great.  I'm expecting wonderful things from them. 

That’s cool. I feel like grammar isn’t as important as interesting writing and ideas because other people can help edit for grammar, whereas ideas have to come from the one person.

I totally agree.  But there's this cool middle ground between commas and semicolon sentence construction and ideas, where you can create really interesting and creative micro-stories out of single, well-constructed sentences.

When people hear "grammar" they usually think of the boring part, but there's so much there to explore that creative writers can get a lot out of.  Anyhow, working on a few articles about it--*eventually* they'll be done.

Alright. I look forward to those articles.

I am also excited for these Professor!

That explains it, grammar did not exist when I was in college.

After I graduated I got a job in a technical writing position (engineering documents), and found out the hard way that grammar was real.

Okay, How in hell could we defeat College English Native students? Poor Gower with this new generation 

Mara you have an excuse to not have done so well at least

Shame on you, Shadowdrake. tsk tsk Shame on you.

Yeah what a loser!

.... wait...

*covers face with hands and cries*

The shame!

I recommend what I am doing this last week. Read a grammar topic and realize at least 3 tests about grammar. I also study each day one phrasal verb. today was Get through.

I am still being terrible, but less terrible than before

Sent mine in late, but hopefully it still gets graded. 

9 out of 10!

I had to submit my own responses to this quiz, to see how I stack up. My problem, though, was that I saw multiple correct answers, depending in part on the context of the sentence.

Years ago I remember coming across this line in a Guiness book of world records, because it had won a contest for "worst sentence":

The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, 'Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my steel through your last meal.' 

The judging criteria were "anticlimax, wordiness, misplaced modifiers, overblown triteness and parody." Regrettably, I have seen this sentence's spawn multiple times in the nether regions of CYS... but I don't think those writers were intentionally trying to be bad.

Bill receives a fine 9.5/10.

Some of the questions do indeed have more than one correct answer. 

 

And this is the site that collects the very best worst sentences:  Bulwer Lytton Contest

These are hilarious: 

"Cassie smiled as she clenched John's hand on the edge of an abandoned pier while the sun set gracefully over the water, and as the final rays of light disappeared into a star-filled sky she knew that there was only one thing left to do to finish off this wonderful evening, which was to throw his severed appendage into the ocean's depths so it could never be found again--and maybe get some custard after."

 

She was like my ex-girlfriend Ashley, who'd stolen my car, broken my heart, murdered my father, robbed a bank, and set off a pipe bomb in Central Park -- tall

 

Upon hearing he was to appear immediately before the Seturia Nebula's Supreme Council, where, in high ceremony, he would be unclothed, bathed in the sacred Waters of Torg Jas, and presented the uniform of a Qadon Shuu Guardian as reward for his courageous defense of the TH-174 Diijoss Collective against Gnar-al troops from the Xinon-Thur Horde, space adventurer Sunspot Carson could only think, "I picked a helluva Baldorian day to wear ladies panties." 

These aren't bad at all. They're brilliant.

Love the Bulwer Lytton Contest! Entered a few times, but my writing must be too good to win haha!

Figured I'd try this, too, because why not?

Grade:  7/10.  You have battled my students to a standstill!

Let's see how a person who was originally banned because his grammar was so bad they thought he was a troll stacks up.

Got a 4.5. 

Can confirm.

It seems we are still capable of getting graded; I'm going to send one over as well.

Not too late to drag down the average.

8.5!  A very respectable score.

Going to just point out my two daughters beat the chicken soup out of not just Gower’s students but the rest of you lot as well.

Just as it should be.

If this test was done with alphabet soup I would have done better! I am very food motivated.

Good to know your daughters will also be amazing writers.

I'm about 95 percent sure he is referring to cricket and maya. 

Happy to have not disappointed. :)

I’m actually pretty proud of my score.

9/10

As well you should be!  Highly respectable.

Would you ever show this thread to your class and tell them that we collectively beat them?

I feel like that would somehow end up in disaster.

“Yes. Hello my college level students. Remember that grammar quiz you took? Well I gave it to some kids on a website and they scored higher than you. Suck on that!”

That would probably end in injuries at worst, and possibly someone throwing a textbook across the room at best. 

However, since I’m not a college student, I’m probably not the best judge of that.

If Gower can single handedly win the super bowl he can single handedly defeat his class in combat WHILE drinking tea.

Totally, and while he is reciting Shakespeare.  He is The Gower after all.

As a professional, I feel that would be a poor choice. Knowing students, one will complain to the dean of the school: arguing that their loss caused emotional impairment. The law suit would be too much to handle.

College isn't highschool, pretty sure they just laugh in their faces when they threaten that kind of thing.

Gower did manage to put a student on anxiety meds once, so that was cool.

Well you never know, I know a person in real life that did something similar because the school said she couldn’t bring her dog to class. She argued that since she got stressed out in class the school had to let her bring an emotional support animal. I do not think it worked as well as she thought it would...

@bigdude98765

Now you get to try.

I really hope you post some more quizzes like this one once your students get to do them, Gower. Sure, I'm still in school so of course have English exams, but since this isn't for school, it's automatically much more fun.

And you get to see what all of your classmates got

Jodithewitch received a very respectable 9.5/10, I am pleased to report.

I literally can't comprehend shit like this, punctuation only really occurs to me as I'm writing or editting my own work. (And I'm sure many will attest to the idea that my punctuation is 'impressionistic' at best!) Outside of the most egregrious examples like 6-10, my brain just goes "Yeah, I get the jist of it" and locks up because I "read it right" without punctuation the first time.

Like I tell my students, this stuff isn't important because of the table manners aspect--showing that you understand which fork/semicolon to you, but because it gives you tools to use as a writer.

They dragged the river.  We have some bad news for you.

They dragged the river, and we have some bad news for you.

They dragged the river; we have some bad news for you.

They dragged the river; unfortunately, we have some bad news for you.

 

I like having the different rhythms available.  To lots of people, that's like an artist goobing out over having this yellow and cadmium yellow and canary yellow (I know nothing about pigments).  But here where we all love to write, this stuff is important.  At least, that's what I hope my students gather from my lengthy diatribes.

I understand that but I also add to that the fact of learning how to use correctly,  making people feel emotions or know new stuff that could make them feel better for a while.

Punctuation helps a lot to set the flow and tone; However, in my case, I am too terrible at grammar that is impossible to make people feel something like that for my writing.

Now I am depressed :( 

You're doing markedly better than your first time here if I remember correctly. A lot of what makes it more difficult for me to understand you sometimes is that you seem to be addressing thoughts a lot more complex than the words you're using. There isn't a lot of self-explanation, it feels like a sculpture with not enough chisel strokes. I think this will fix itself with time when you get more comfortable with your lexicon and can detail your brain-sauces better.

Yeah, exactly that. I have a concept in the head, but not the tools to express it or enhance the words in English.  That's why grammar and punctuation are so important.  However, many natives aren't aware of how important they are to a language.

Submitted, hopefully I'm not too late.  

 

Hi, I pmed my answers to you already and I hope it's not too late.  I'm not an English native speaker and I'm slowly learning it so it's  really helpful to me if you could tell me what's wrong with my answers.

I'll grade the several that I received recently later today.  Thanks!