Minecraft is now officially part of Australian education

[DaedalusAlpha]

It's probably that way in Swedish as well, I just haven't bothered to learn it

I've always thought playing minecraft at school was sort of a waste of time, but apparently it's very good at teaching you sentence punctuation, at least I learned something

[Gersh]

My wife and I had a long discussion about the correct answer before I scrolled down to see the correct answer.

We guessed option 3, because it looked liked the writer has added their own pause in what would have been a normaly spoken sentence.

Wonder what grade that was meant for?

[Sorontar]

Originally Posted by Gersh

Wonder what grade that was meant for?

Looking at the twitters by the same person, I believe it was year 7. That is the first year of secondary education in my state.

I had a teacher in two years of high school who was a stickler for correct punctuation. Trained me well before I became a linguist

As to the British/American English differences, sometimes there are distinct differences. Sometimes it is an added option. This might be one of them.

In other 'quoted' situations, there are other options. While it isn't a great reference for matters like this, Wikipedia does say (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop):

The traditional convention in American English and in Canada is "aesthetic" punctuation, or "typesetters' quotation", where periods and commas are included inside quotation marks even if they are not part of the quoted sentence. The style used in the UK, and to a less extent in the U.S., is "logical punctuation", which stays true to the punctuation used by the original source, placing commas and full stops inside or outside quotation marks depending on where they were placed in the material that is being quoted. Scientific and technical publications, including in the U.S., almost universally use it for that reason.

This is talking about quoting text from other publications, not speech.

• "Carefree" means "free from care or anxiety." (aesthetic or typesetters' style)
• "Carefree" means "free from care or anxiety". (logical style used here because the full stop was not part of the original quotation)

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[DaedalusAlpha]

Ah that explains it then, as an engineer I naturally gravitate towards the logical style as opposed to the aesthetic (read: illogical) style

As a programmer you have to be very careful about what you have in your strings, and where your commas are (or you'll get syntax errors). You also have to be careful about how you concatenate strings; "a short" + "string" is an easy beginners mistake as the result would be "a shortstring", hence I'm very careful about how strings concatenate. Although apparently the world at large doesn't seem to follow C++ rules :-/

[DarkDuck]

meh, this is why we use Microsoft Word lol

[Sorontar]

Originally Posted by DaedalusAlpha

Ah that explains it then, as an engineer I naturally gravitate towards the logical style as opposed to the aesthetic (read: illogical) style

Well, the point of the NAPLAN question is actually that you need the punctuation. It doesn't give you the choice between placing it left or right of ". I included the wikipedia example simply to demonstrate that that the difference between British English and American English is more than just including "u" in words.

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[Obsi]

now was MiniObsi sick, or off for philisophical reasons?

lol, no actually sick, she went to the Dr and all! Just bad/good timing depending on how you think about it

At the moment our whole family is sick - I have a chest infection (as a follow on from Tonsillitis last week), and Sor has the sniffles


So this begs the question - how come there is a pic of the NAPLAN test? that means someone probably took their phone into the test - surely that's not allowed?

[Sorontar]

Originally Posted by Obsi

So this begs the question - how come there is a pic of the NAPLAN test? that means someone probably took their phone into the test - surely that's not allowed?

He put the picture up hours after doing it. They might have been allowed to keep the question sheets.

But yes it is a little questionable. I was debating whether I had an excuse for "publishing" it and eventually decided that it was part of a critical discussion and I wasn't revealing exactly which test it applied to, nor the correct answer, at the time.

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[DarkDuck]

all test sheets are available after the test is done anyway (you can get past Uni exams and stuff).

Personally I think the issue here is that we are not taught proper english these days, TBH one of the things lacking in my education was punctuation, hell I got A's in english and this was not the sort of engrish I larnt!

[Sorontar]

If you think your English is bad, just wait till you see some of the translations at Engrish.com

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