Search results for 'tag:Exclamation marks tag:Pronouns' matching tags 'Exclamation marks' and 'Pronouns'

Re: passive voice

Cool Breeze — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:51:51 GMT

Huevos
Goodman
football is a popular sport played almost in all Asain and European countries. There is no direct agent here but it's still a passive structure.
That sentence is not in the passive voice.

Football is a popular sport [which/that is] played in almost all Asian and European countries.

The sentence consists of a main clause and a relative clause, which has been reduced by omitting the relative pronoun and the passive auxiliary (is). I call such structures clause equivalents, but terminology is unimportant here. The relative clause - or its equivalent - is in the passive voice.

A sentence ends with a full stop / period, an exclamation mark or a question mark. A clause need not have any punctuation after it, which is the case after the main clause in this sentence.

Re: English/ Spanish/ French/ German Phrases & Sentences!

Forbes — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:41:02 GMT

The reason is that many Spanish questions can have the same form as a statement and inversion of subject and verb is quite common in statements. Also subject pronouns are not usually expressed. In speech the difference between questions and statements is apparent from intonation. In writing the upsidedown question mark is to warn you a question is coming. I suppose they decided that if they were going to have upside question marks they may as well have upside down exclamation marks too.

Examples:

Usted es my amable. You are very kind.

Es usted muy amable. You are very kind.

Â¿Es usted espaÃ±ol? Are you Spanish?

Â¿Usted es espaÃ±ol? Are you Spanish?

Eres loco. You are mad.

Â¿Eres loco? Are you mad?

Punctuate your posts, says research

matthewg — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:21:03 GMT

Focus Magazine, September 04:

Correspondence is taking longer to read because of poorly punctuated email, according to optometrists at the University of Bradford. They discovered that missing fullstops and capital letters are behind the time-wasting trend.

View the full press release here.

By not punctuating your posts on the forums, you are also wasting everyone's time. It is very easy to capitalise letters on a PC keyboard, so while laziness is excusable for SMS messages, it isn't for posts. Common habits which are very annoying include:

Multiple question marks/exclamation marks, where one will do. Example here.
Converting the personal pronoun "I" to "i." Example here.
Dot overload. Example here.
No spaces after punctuation marks. Example here.
Minimalist punctuation. Example here.

Please add your own pet hates.