Monday, December 1, 2008

COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT

NEW STUDENTS
Welcome to Kathleen, Kong, and Shu-Chao who are joining the course in December. We hope you will enjoy the course and that you will participate in the blog.

CONGRATULATIONS
Another student has successfully completed the course; congratulations to Jonathan: well done:-)

BLOGGER AWAY!
The blogger (Veronica) will be away between Dec. 5th and Jan. 4th. In her absence, Tamara Renkas (tamaraAT…) will coordinate the blog. Look forward to some holiday specials coming up and keep on participating!

LAST WEEK'S GRAMMAR QUESTION:

While I had arrived in Paris neither the bus or the trains was running, the following day the buses ran and trains had been started to move later at the afternoon.

1. Word confusion: “while” indicates that something else was happening at the same time; here you need “when”.
2. Verb tense: instead of the past perfect “had arrived” use the simple past “arrived”.
3. Paired conjunction: the paired negative conjunction is “neither … nor.”
4. Subject-verb agreement: With a paired conjunction, the nearest subject to the verb determines the number. Because “trains” is plural, change the singular verb “was” to “were.”
5. Verb tense: the buses ran all day, so use the past progressive “were running”.
6. Verb tense/voice: “had been started” is the passive voice of the past perfect; here the simple past of the active voice “started” is needed.
7. Preposition usage: While you should use “at” with a specific time, for a more general time such as “the afternoon”, use “in”.
8. Punctuation: There are two independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction, so separate them with a semicolon instead of a comma.

Next blog: Friday, December 11th.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When the answer to the previous grammar question is posted, I think it would be beneficial to see the original question.

Anonymous said...

The answer is very good. I think the original question is not necessary to show.

Anonymous said...

The answer is very good. I think the original question is not necessary to show.

Veronica Baig said...

Janine: The original question is there--it's just under the title;-)

Miranda said...

Thank you for the warm welcome and the Mother's Day wishes :) Looking forward to getting started in the course.