PUBLIC MARKS from norequest with tags english & language

Got it? A simple English sentence, no fancy words or tricky grammatical twists, just a plain old English sentence that any native speaker can understand. Right? Wrong. Or at least that's what recent research by Dr. Ewa Dabrowska of Northumbira University suggests. Many English speakers don't really understand simple English grammar. Now I'm not pointing any fingers here, at least not at you gentle reader, or at least not to your face. Despite what you read from the TranslationGuy commentariate, I know from heart-breaking experience that anyone who wades through more than a line or two of my posts is a master at parsing meaning from nonsense. I learned long ago that no one knows what the hell I'm talking about most of the time anyway. And all this time I thought it was me. So Dr. Dabrowska's findings have lifted a great weight from my shoulders, because now I can blame others for my incomprehensibility. Dabrowska started quizzing adults on reading comprehension of simple phrases like the headline above. Over-educated grad students were tested alongside under-educated people who had left school at 16 or so.