An advertisement:      The Howard Neverov Creative Writing Awards, sponsored by Washington University in St. Louis.   Open to high school juniors and seniors 3 prizes of $250 each both in fiction and in poetry. Students may send one typed entry in each genre.   Entries must be postmarked by March 15, 2009...   Please, answer the questions: 1. Who are high school juniors and seniors in US? 2. What did they mean writing "one typed entry in each genre"? 3. What are "Entries" in that context? 4. What is "to be postmarked"?
123836
Today, I've heard my lecturer who turned to us by the word: "sophomores". This the is the first time that I was exposed to this word in the meaning of "student of 2nd year".   My question if there are other names for the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th etc. and if all these appellations are common in use?
51032
More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance ), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).  I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.  I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.  What do you think? Should we add this feature?  Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.  Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.
49234
Here's this message from Sathya:    It usually shows like this in the rooms when you're in another chat room:    I edited the post to change a word repetition that sounded weird (Can you tell I'm bored and we don't have any flags in our queue?), and suddenly it changed the author to me:    What happened here?
63874
I am using biblatex to produce a bibliography with several sections like this:  \defbibheading{cvpubs}[List of Publications]{\section{#1}} \defbibheading{subbibliography}{\noindent\bfseries\itshape{#1}} \printbibheading[heading=cvpubs]  \printbibliography[env=nolabel,sorting=ydnt,keyword=peer,heading=subbibliography,title={Peer-reviewed articles}] \printbibliography[env=nolabel,sorting=ydnt,keyword=chapter,heading=subbibliography,title={Book chapters}]  % and so on ...   Now I need to mark certain entries with an asterisk left of the entry. Something like this:  * Besserwisser, John (2007). "Whatever you say, you're wrong". In: Journal for Know-it-alls. (1)1. pp. 1-19.  Is this possible?  P.S. If you are wondering why anyone would want to do such a thing: In my case it is simply demanded by a funding agency to mark certain publication in my publication list with an asterisk. But you could also use this to mark the mandatory readings or the recommended readings or so in a reading list.
23179
I have a written thesis, as my Final year project. I have submitted in university.   but now i want to make it professionally mine.   I want to publish it some where but i don't have such kind of experience before. I am total Rookie in this field.  Any Expert Opinion?  Note: Thesis in About "Handwriting Recognition "
108234
I have seen some writing where people have a list or a figure in writing and they will write something like this:     The information is provided in Image   3:-   Is that correct? Is this a British style?
15578
Consider the brief passage:     "I love your work, but calling you 'the artist' {1} just doesn't seem to be   cutting it anymore. What shall I call you?"      "OK. Call me George." {2}   So my instincts tell me to put {1} in single quotes as opposed to no punctuation (or perhaps even italics) but to do the opposite for {2}. Is this right? Why?  Let me expand this one further iteration:     "Wow, that's a great name, especially with this crowd. Maybe for your next book    you should call yourself Ringo."{3}
107310
If you have two questions, one embedded in the other, should there be a single, final question mark covering both the main question and the nested one, or one for each?   Here is an example:     A) Does anyone know the answer (or can anyone explain?) if there should be one or two question marks in this sentence?   Here is another example just to clarify:     B) Does anyone know the answer (or does anyone not know?)?    I am mainly concerned with the embedded question coming at the end of sentence like this: ...(...?)?   That looks really odd to me. It doesn't seem right; however, I feel that it looks fine if I have the nested question in the middle of the sentence, i.e. of the form:     C) Does anyone know the answer (or does anyone not know?) to this question?   The punctuation in C looks correct to me, if I take the first question mark out then it looks looks wrong, but it seems that B and C are exactly, but for the position of the parentheses, the equivalent of each other.  P.S. One last point, are single and double quotation marks considered to be parentheses?
75356
first post between 12/26 and 1/1   Does that mean your very first post as a user should be made in those days?  Or that you should be the first user to post any post on a site starting 12/26?  Or something else?  The first option seems somewhat more likely but I'm not sure I'm parsing the description right.
78785
I would like to write an essay which gives information about the charts but because I am not native English speaker, when I started to write down my essay I came across the similar problems that I do sometimes.  Here my sentence:  Figure 1 and figure 2 show the percentage of people, WHOSE age is between 25-44 and over 65, WHO purchased concert, cinema and theater tickets online over the first three months of 2006 in three countries, WHICH are Australia, the UK, Malaysia.  Here is my questions:  1.How can I give the information of age and of what do people buy in one sentence?  2.Such vital and important information on the figures can be used as indefinite relative clause?
54947
I recently got confused with the following choices while talking to a friend after class:  I sent her an email that I wouldn't come to the class. I sent her an email that I wouldn't be coming to the class. I sent her an email that I won't be coming to the class. I sent her an email that I won't come to the class.  Can we use the third and fourth sentence by any chance or is it completely ungrammatical? Some websites including the NYTimes have instances where both the past and future are mixed in their reports.
88275
So, I noticed last week that . Well, it turns out that the wording is actually completely incorrect.  noticed that all of the users on the front page are the OPs of the questions listed there. This area is the issue:  It reads  Top Network Users These users asked or provided top answers for the posts on this page  I found that confusing, so I proposed this wording (provided by ):  Top Network Users These users provided the top questions and answers on this page  But, again, the users listed there are the ones who asked the questions; none answered them:  (click for larger image) Since all of the &quot;Top Network Users&quot; are the askers, it should be something like this:  Top Network Users These users asked the questions listed on this page  Either that, or answerers of those questions should be included along with the askers.
95609
I am writing about some leadership stuff, and I am trying to say that I am leading the 14-15 year old boys. How do I correctly use year-olds as in, "I was the adviser to the 14-15 year-olds."  Thanks in advance
118579
I want to write in the announcement a description of an eventual apartment, which I am searching as a rental. I am interested in apartments with 2, 3, or 4 rooms. How should I write the compound adjective with numbers? With dashes or not&nbsp;— to indicate the range of rooms. If with dashes, should it be em or en dashes?  E.g.         a 2-to-4-room apartment?   a 2-4-room apartment?
81429
After showing me the house, Nana led us to the living room, and with Mongai's Take Me Somewhere Nice playing on in the background, we started on the Scotch we'd bought at the 7-Eleven. The dim light and the soft   Is the comma correctly positioned before the italics in the example above? Or I should place the comma after and?
123123
I just received the following comment from an Elsevier editor &quot;The manuscript does not reach the required quality standard of this journal.&quot;. To my mind say just that or nothing is pretty much the same considering the minimum requirements for data openness and transparency. there is already a good explanation of the submission process here:  However, as an automated process, is prone to flaws as well as to improvements. And does not explain in detail the received comment stated above. Any thoughts on deciphering the comment stated above are greatly appreciated. thank you EDIT: When I posted this question I forgot to add an essential and relevant fact to this conversion, which is: many and many scientific researchers don't have the opportunity to develop their research works in a team or even do it collaboratively. They have to rely on themselves to present their findings and defend their thesis. And everyone here is acquainted with the syndrome of  &quot;tunnel effect&quot; when writing. So having someone, that can give a small contribution to unlocking someone else research writing, I see as a welcoming behavior that can only benefit the scientific community at the individual level.
6828
I'm getting confused about these two sentences:        The government should provide education to its citizens.   She has received a great education since high school.      I think education is an uncountable noun.  Why does the second sentence use the article a before education?   It might be a stupid question, but I really want to understand this topic clearly. I looked on many websites but there was no related answer to this.