You may have come across this book of English quizzes by one of two ways, by chance or purposefully looking for such. Regardless, you may have your own motive to pursue it further. It may be curiosity, to improve your English, to avoid being embarrassed and mocked (more on this later), to write better essays or reports, to achieve higher grades, to attain or to succeed at employment positions, and to communicate clearly in such as legal or medical matters, for example.
Whether you are an English language beginner or highly proficient,
or between, these quizzes have a variety of features, many of which will
benefit you, fulfill some need. They include:
About 120 kinds of mistakes people make, presented in sentences
Corrections of these mistakes, readily available, in sentence form
Where helpful, additional comments and explanations provided
Repetitions throughout the quizzes for several of the common mistakes
Progression from simpler common mistakes to rarer high level ones
The challenge of eight quizzes to test you
An opportunity to learn your level of English proficiency
An opportunity to learn from mistakes you missed
Freedom to learn at your own pace, over time
Appendices with examples for two areas of particular difficulty.
We trust that a number of these features will appeal to you.
Have you noticed how many signs and memes (quotes) are around in which people make fun of bad English? It is almost like a new brand of humor. A Google search the other day revealed just how vast this topic is, an overwhelming flood of sites and videos and public signs people had photographed to poke fun at the errors in those signs or memes. You may have shrugged off your English grammar or spelling, hoping no one would notice. You may feel uneasy when you see such signs being made fun of. Yet improper English has become so common and accepted as normal, one senses that it is not ridiculed except in certain situations. Then, it can have devastating effects, especially on young students, and even the employees with less than kind superiors.
If we made it through elementary school, and hey, even graduated from high school, we might just feel glad we've escaped the biting humor of those who laugh at bad use of English, spoken or written.
But, what if we end up in a job where we are expected to write: reports for our boss, or media announcements, or something else; our assignment may be to make regular posts on behalf of our business on various social media platforms and the goal there is to get as many eyes as possible on our posts. How long are you going to anguish over just two or three lines a day on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, or horrors, on Linkedin where the professionals await? What if someone with more advanced English decides to share your post as a joke for others to laugh at?
If you spend a lifetime of reading plenty of good quality books and practice writing and speaking English - a lot! - that should help over time.
Or if you are cramming for an English exam, or if you are considering a job/career which will entail writing for the eyes of the general public, you can set up a frenzied effort to seek out grammar rules, memorize them. That could be of some immediate help.
You could ask a close friend who is an 'ace' at everything grammar-wise to correct you whenever you make a mistake. There is a saying that we can learn a lot from studying our mistakes. Each instance of being corrected may stick in your memory and hopefully eventually stick.
(Hint: As you remember more good grammar rules, you may be tempted to correct others when they make mistakes; be aware that those friends may start to avoid you.– Not everyone likes to be corrected.)
This eBook, Quizzes for Spoken and Written English, has eight (8) quizzes, increasingly difficult, and can be used by yourself or in group or class setting. Each quiz has 20 statements that were heard publically as used by talkshow hosts, newscasters, sports reporters, interviewers, politicians and ordinary citizens. You fill in the correct English in the blank underneath each statement. The answers follow on the next page, so you can immediately find out if you were right.
These quizzes may encourage you to do a simple Google search that will lead you to many more sites that offer quizzes of all types and directed at different age-groups.
Then, we would suggest that you gather a list of the grammar rules that tend to stump you - even after you have learned the correct way to speak or write in that situation. Next, make a point of using one or two of these rules in a new way, yet correctly, on one given day. For the following day choose another one or two grammar rules. Watch and listen for others who missuse them. (You may have learned it that way because that's what you heard so often.) You can do this exercise orally – spoken English – or written, or even both to make sure the new correct way of using English will stick with you for the rest of your life.
Don't be too surprised if you soon find yourself spotting or hearing these ‘bloopers’ like a ‘mind alert’, whether it is someone else, or yourself out of habit, in which case you should correct yourself immediately, now knowing better.
If you teach English, say, Junior High or High school, even at college level or perhaps an ESL class, you might want to have this PDF file handy to print out and hand out to your students, one quiz at a time.
If your class is virtual (eg., on Zoom), we have some Interactive PDF's of the individual quizzes which you may wish to send out to your students by email. The answer pages are NOT included in those files. Your students may enter their version of the corrected sentences, save the file with their name and email it back to you.
This will save a lot of paper sent through the printer, and the students with poor, or illegible handwriting will be glad that they can type their entries and hope for better marks.
If you want just the PDF edition of the eBook, and are prepared to print out paper copies if necessary, you may have that for $10.
If you would like the eBook AND the package of separate Interactive PDF quizzes to be included, then you will want to purchase the Kit Edition for $17.99. That is: Quizzes for Spoken and Written English (Kit Edition) = $17.99.
The author, Eugene Wedel, was an English teacher before retirement. It has pained him to hear announcers and reporters, even on the National News, use incorrect grammar in their interviews and reports. Mr. Wedel has a dry wry sort of humor and couldn’t help making rhetorical comments under his breath when he heard such English mistakes. He has sketched a droll (predictive?) scene of a grave where the extinct personal pronoun ‘ME’ and the verb 'lie' are buried. He also provided such witty comments after some of the quiz sentences.
He has written two books, a political novel, and the other, of 183 pensive Christian poems, is coming out soon.
When we discussed making these grammar quizzes into an e-book to sell online, I suggested that some comic emoticons might need to go with some of his comments. He agreed that I insert such touches of humor into the quizzes; we hope they make you smile, and maybe even pick up from them a clue as to what is wrong in the quiz sentences.
$9.99 Cdn (eBook only)
Ruth Marlene Friesen
The Responsible One
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