by sheila_admin | Feb 11, 2014 | English Usage, The ICAL TEFL Blog
A professor of comparative English at Columbia university said that commas should be abolished. He said we should get rid of them and no one would care. He says we should kill them. Destroy them. Take each one and murder it in cold blood. And the reaction? Pages of...
by sheila_admin | Feb 7, 2014 | The ICAL TEFL Blog
Earlier in the year we reported on how Cambridge city council in the UK had decided not to use apostrophes in street signs and how examiners for Cambridge Assessment (the ones who do all the TEFL exams) had supported this idea. It was, of course, ridiculous of them to...
by sheila_admin | Aug 3, 2012 | Sentence Structure
Emoticons are a modern form of English punctuation. Essentially they are a pictorial representation of a human face which are used to give nuance to a text. For example, I could write: See you on Thursday. In itself, this seems fairly innocuous. However, if next...
by sheila_admin | Aug 3, 2012 | Sentence Structure
Brackets and Parentheses are punctuation marks in English which everyone knows, but many people get wrong. Even native speakers. But before getting on to how to use them, we’ll begin by explaining exactly what the difference between them are. Types of Bracket...
by sheila_admin | Jun 17, 2012 | Sentence Structure, Vocabulary & Spelling
A semicolon sits half way between a period/full stop and a comma. It has little or nothing to do with a colon, however. It is used instead of a period/full stop when we want to avoid too strong a break between phrases and instead of a comma when we need a stronger...
