The pets I hate are snakes and large black rats.  Oh, sorry, you mean ‘pet hates’: things that particularly get on your nerves!  The Grumpy Examiner’s pet hates are sloppy, easily avoidably errors, like these:

Writing an irrelevant story

If your story is entitled ‘The Storm’, and you write a story about a kitten eating dog food, you will get no marks.  None.  Zero.  Zilch!  If you don’t write a story relevant to the title, it doesn’t matter how good it is, you won’t get any marks!
Changing the Title

Last year, one of the questions in my school’s exam was ‘A Visit From A Relative.’  One child wrote about their uncle visiting – and gave the story the title ‘My Mad Uncle’.  But that wasn’t the title! Silly boy!
Comic-book Writing
There are four things that would annoy the Grumpy Examiner in the sentence below. Can you guess what they are?

 

  1. You don’t need to put shouting in capitals. The speech verb ‘screamed’ tells the reader that the character is shouting.
  2. Never use more than one exclamation mark
  3. In stories, writing numerals as words – Bob is aged five
  4. An ellipsis (a ‘dot dot dot’) is made of three full stops. Just three, like this...

The sentence should read like this:


(c) Nick Hitchen 2007
Last updated on August 13, 2007