I've never understood why students have such a hard time remembering the names of various marks of punctuation (you know - period, comma, apostrophe, and God forbid you ask them to remember the word semicolon). Today, I was explaining how to quote a resource in an essay. It went something like this...
Me: So how do I show that I've copied this sentence from another book?
Class: ...silence...
Me: What mark of punctuation do I use to show these are not my own words? How do I show I'm quoting someone else? (thinking the phrase quoting would be a dead give-away)
Student: Oh!! You use those flying commas!
Me: What?
Student: You know, those flying comma thingys.
It took me a minute to realize that "flying commas" is 7th grade lingo for "quotation marks." I love middle school. :)
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