Dear bloggers, I turn to you for therapy.

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Red marker blogathon: You are giving an exam, is it?

Following the posts at MFT's, Starry's, TPL's and Sue's blogs...

Red mark 1: Wrongly formed question tag.

"You are a good boy, isn't it?"

"You don't want to go, is it?"

Argghh! OK, now that I'm done with the screaming, here's my explanation on question tags.

Question tags are sentence structures where a statement is ended or tagged with a question. The verb used in the question tag should be the negation of the verb used in the statement.

So the correct usage of the above two would be:

"You are a good boy, aren't you?"

"You don't want to go, do you?"

Go here to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_question

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Red mark 2: Do you give or take an exam?

"I'm giving my board exams in March"

No, you are not giving any exam. In fact you are taking the exam and if anything it is your professor giving you the exam! Duh.

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Bonus red mark 3: out-of-out

With all this exam talk, how can one forget the "I scored out-of-out" statement. Gah! Out-of-out seems to be a direct but totally nonsensical derivative of "100 out of 100". If you did get an *out-of-out* in English, please have your paper reevaluated.