Before I start my e-portfolio 2, I would like to tell you a joke first.
Johns, can you tell the class how do you spell elephant?
> E-L-E-F-A-N-T, sir.
The dictionary spells it E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T.
>But, sir, you didn’t ask me how the dictionary spells it!
Hah hah, funny, right? So it is easy to recognize a spelling mistake the student made, however, can you tell that there is a hidden grammar mistake in the joke? Yup, it is in the first sentence. We should change it “how you spell elephant”.
This is a common mistake that I always encountered when I used the sentence structure “can you tell …” or “do you see …”. I thought it was quite strange. Why do we need to use a statement following the first part of the sentance when we intend to post a question? It sounds very unnatural to me. So I looked up into a grammar handbook and found the answer. It is because that “can”here is used to ask for a permission to post an inquiry, with the second part describing it. So every time we see “can you tell” or “do you know”, we should rearrange it into a statement, for the second part is a clause.
That is how I learned from my grammar mistake. So do you tell me how you got improved from yours?
