quote: Materials sent to schools as part of the Government's flagship national literacy strategy are riddled with grammatical errors, the British Educational Research Association conference was told last week. Academics found a number of mistakes, including confusion over tenses, incorrect rules and poor quality writing tips...
The Year 7 spelling bank... lists "autopsy" alongside "autobiography" as an example of the use of the prefix "auto" to denote things done by oneself. Other errors include saying that nouns which end in "-fe" always replace the "f" with a "v" when they become verbs. As a result "safe" becomes "save" or "saved" but "knife" becomes "knive" or "knived".
...the Year 7 spelling bank... (is) "intent on finding patterns and rules even when there are none"...
I think I'm most intrigued by the concept of a self-administered autopsy !
(Yes, I do know the origin of the word "autopsy" but I think that its English meaning is so far from the origin that it isn't a useful example of the auto- prefix, especially not when being presented as a spelling rule !)
