What shape is your semicolon?

[Wowbagger]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/10/primary-school-children-lose-marks-in-sats-tests-for-mis-shaped-commas

Good grief...

[Kim]

Important things semicolongs (TBAGO - I'm testing a keybaord for barakta).  As a child of the 80s they never appeared in English, because we didn't have grammar in those days.

They're made with the key next to the <L>.  I think the only time I've actually written one by hand was in a Java exam.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

I got taught grammar by a retired Colonel (terrifying, a living example of why-we won-the-war).  I have never known anything so complicated; we used stagger out of the classroom barely able to remember how talking was done.

[T42]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/10/primary-school-children-lose-marks-in-sats-tests-for-mis-shaped-commas

Good grief...

Good grief, yes. On two counts, the substance and the first paragraph:

Ten and 11-year-olds who answered questions correctly did not get mark, in line with guidance described as ‘beyond parody’

Or was that sarcasm?

My papa, BTW, had a thing about commas. They had to (Voice of God speaking) consist of a well-rounded dot, like a full stop, with a pointy tail of the correct length at the correct angle. Anything else drew scorn and a diet of gruel*. But then my papa could produce lettering that looked as if it had been typeset and printed.

*lie re gruel

[Cudzoziemiec]

In the set of 4 photos labelled 2 right, 2 wrong, I really can't tell which are meant to be right and which wrong. The dot seems to be above the level of the I in all of them, so according to the rules, they should all fail. Anyway, I think I'd probably use a comma in that sentence.

[pcolbeck]

I'd be stuffed as my writing slopes the wrong way apparently.

[Jasmine]

When I read the guidance, none of it seemed unreasonable.  For example, a semicolon that is bigger than normal writing isn't really right.  However, I then saw the actual test. Asking kids to insert punctuation in pen/pencil into regular sized printed text is actually a bit of a piss-take anyway.

[Ian H]

My immediate reaction was that some semi-educated pedant had designed the tests; after consideration I think that's not unfair.

[ian]

Children with untidy handwriting shouldn't be punished, of course. They should be killed. It's the only way they will learn. Some may say this is an unduly harsh way to banish the scourge of scruffily illegible handwriting, but when I say killed, I mean humanely euthanised. I am not, after all, a monster.

[Kim]

Children with untidy handwriting shouldn't be punished, of course. They should be killed. It's the only way they will learn. Some may say this is an unduly harsh way to banish the scourge of scruffily illegible handwriting, but when I say killed, I mean humanely euthanised. I am not, after all, a monster.

As opposed to steering them towards the traditional career paths for people with illegible handwriting: medicine and engineering.  Because what could possibly go wrong?

[Ian H]

My father had immaculate copper-plate handwriting by the age of 15.  Mine was never quite so finely crafted, but it has got less tidy as I type more and write less.  The handwriting of many, if not most, people under 35 looks appalling, verging on the illiterate.  But many, if not most, are better typists than I am.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Children's untidy handwriting is often easier to read than adults' tidy handwriting, simply because they're thinking about each letter and making an effort to reproduce each shape rather than squiggling out whole lines in the (often misplaced) confidence that people will know what they mean.

[Kim]

I've basically lost the ability to do joined-up writing.  I can invoke the muscle-memory, but the output is effectively useless noise.  I suppose if I took the time to draw a picture of the characters I could accurately reproduce the way I learned to write joined-up when I was 9, but the bandwidth of that is so appallingly low that it's impossible to think and write at the same time.  (Indeed, this is why I've used a keyboard to write for as long as I've been allowed to.)

In real life, when I use a pen to write on things, I use block capitals.  It's marginally faster than bit-bashing cursive, and is much more legible (which is usually important, because if I'm writing on something it's nearly always a label of some kind).

I've never really been able to read an arbitrary person's^[1] cursive handwriting.  When I see people do it it feels like there's a bit of my brain missing.  Sure, if I pick my way through I can make an educated guess at each letter and assemble them into words, but I wouldn't call that reading.  It's a process more akin to decoding binary coded ASCII.


_{[1] There are exceptions, but most of them were in my class when I was 9.}

[ian]

I don't do cursive. I print. I have a 'girl's handwriting' apparently and (a) I'm not giving it back even if she asks nicely, (b) they've evidently not seen my wife's scrawl which is marginally more difficult to understand than Linear B, (c) I don't even put love hearts above my i's (unless I'm writing to my boss or the bank) and (d) is easy to read.

I have no idea how I came to write like I do. I am sure I was a disappointment to my teachers. Mostly because they told me so.