12 ms·

My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt yo

My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well. Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. That may be a self-reinforcing feedback loop because a lot of bad projects have a lot of terrible or non-existent documentation. And on a personal level I don't want to work with someone that communicates like a tween (NB: I'm not saying that you do, but I've run across it many times). I also take a lot of issue with the "you know what I mean so you're being a pedant" retort. Not only is it wholly counter-productive, but it's not even accurate when you're talking about globally connected people. Quite frequently a non-native speaker will stumble upon what is written and be thoroughly confused.

irahul 14y ago
> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. Eh, how about asking me about const-correctness than inferring from my use of "it's" and "its"? You know, you can actually talk about const-correctness instead of inferring from the grammar test. > At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well. It's hard to be rash with code if you aren't copy pasting. It isn't the same as posting comments on HN. > And on a personal level I don't want to work with someone that communicates like a tween As I already said elsewhere, you are assuming things to be binary when they are not. The spectrum between "liek dis if u cry everytim" crowd and "People with bad grammar should be hanged" people is quite wide. > Quite frequently a non-native speaker will stumble upon what is written and be thoroughly confused. Not an excuse for bad grammar, but a non-native speaker is fine with both "didn't go" and "didn't went". I don't see how he is going to be confused. Non-native speakers are confused when they encounter phrases, idioms and slangs they don't know. Fun exercise - ask an Indian if he/she would like to go out with you sometime. He/she would most likely say yes/no without understanding what you meant. Do you have any examples where simple grammar mistakes confuse non-native speaker? I am a non-native speaker, and am curious to know.
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  While I could exhaustively ask about every aspect of every language you might have to work in, it's far simpler to use a proxy. The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. And since your job certainly isn't going to be writing code for 8 hours straight, the ability to communicate well is a good skill to have. For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself. Re: the non-native speaker part. I've had to help a lot of people out over the years on various support channels because someone wrote "then" instead of "than" or "loose" instead of "lose." Since many people seem to be able to read & write in foreign languages but not necessarily speak them, homophones are easily confused. Personally I know enough French & German to follow along with most technical materials, but easily get derailed by misspellings. Is it an idiom I'm unaware of? Is it a word I don't know? Is it some sort of slang?
  - irahul 14y ago
    > The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous. Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact. > For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself. What on earth does cleaning up mean? I shower in the morning. I am not going to take a special shower for you. Whether or not I shave depends on my mood. I don't see how on earth an interview with you should affect my facial hairs. I am not coming in looking like a hobo, and anything beyond that isn't your call at all. Why the hell people count on metric which doesn't indicate a person's qualities relevant to the job? Whatever the fuck happened to phone screening, checking up open source projects, on-site problem solving, having a conversation, checking up references. Where and why the fuck wearing a suit or taking a grammar test came into picture?
    - 14y ago
kamaal 14y ago
>>I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. If this is true, then apart from US and UK people who write good code don't exist elsewhere??? Its difficult to take you seriously after reading this.
- urbanjunkie 14y ago
  Are the US and the UK the only countries that have people who can express themselves well in their native language?
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  Huh? I never said you had to communicate well in English. Even in your quoted text you can see that I said "in their native language." And clever use of "its" there :-)
sampo 14y ago
As a non-native speaker of English, I have been wondering how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from the kind of sloppy grammar that is typical only for native speakers of English? [1] I learned English at school as a second language, and we would always start with the written form, and then learn how to pronounce. So my "hash table" is primarily organized based on the written form, and it would be impossible for me to mix "two" and "too", "they're" or "their" or "there", or "its" and "it's" [2]. I hadn't even realized that "too" and "two" are pronounced the same, before a native speaker pointed it out to me, as my hash table doesn't support that kind of searches. Also my native language (Finnish) uses a (nearly) phonetic writing, so phonetic misspelling of words is mainly restricted to people with no high school level of education, and who didn't do that well in primary school either. I do, like the writer of the liked article, get that feeling of sloppiness, when I see those spelling or grammar mistakes in English text, but I don't really know how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from them? I probably should not use as harsh standards as I do with Finnish, since those misspellings seem relatively common in English in the web. [1] Well, typical of people who learned spoken English before written English, but in the modern world this pretty much coincides with native speakers. [2] Well, "it's" and "its" is maybe a border case, maybe not totally impossible to mix those two, just very unlikely.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  This is interesting. On the other hand, I would like to know since Finnish as a language fascinates me: How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate?
  - sampo 14y ago
    How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate? Nonexistent. I don't think even preschool children ever mix those. I don't have kids, so I can't say how it is with the kids who are just learning to speak. Also in English, you don't see people mixing "into" and "onto" even remotely as often as the mistakes the linked article talked about.
drivingmenuts 14y ago
Here's a thought: you're assuming I care equally about grammar and programming. If I use the wrong form of "it's" in a sentence, someone might wince somewhere (possible even rage a bit). No one is going to die. If I use the wrong form of const, it's possible that all hell will rain down upon the Earth and millions will die in horrible gut-wrenching pain, clasping their loved ones to their chest and bemoaning the gods (the desirability of such an outcome is a wholly different matter). The two issues do not equate at all. ED: fixed spelling of "grammar".
- eropple 14y ago
  If you don't care equally about grammar and programming, then you aren't wanted. You can no doubt latch onto a dev shop that doesn't care about that. I don't see the problem and I admire the attitude. Use of the written word is important and, aside from the exceptions mentioned in the article, I think significantly less of people who don't write or speak well. It's important to me to work with good communicators and you can't be a good communicator if you can't speak and write well.
- HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
  No one is going to die Since you brought it up... I am a software developer for a medical device manufacturer. Poor spelling and grammar can change the meaning of a requirement, leading to a software error. Down the road someone can certainly die. More likely, however, is that grammar and spelling errors in Requirements, Design, Procedure or other documents, or in code commit comments, or code comments themselves implies to an auditor for a Regulatory Body that our code itself is sloppy. That leads the auditor to dig deeper. Dig deep enough and you will find enough to hang someone. For just this reason, we must pay attention to proper documentation, down to appropriate word choice. No, we don't test for usage of written English during interviewing, but it's strongly enforced during day-to-day work.
gizmo686 14y ago
>"My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well." The difference is that const makes sense. "Its" is the plural of "it", although we seem to use "they". "It's" is the possesive of "it", although we seem to use it as "it is". "It is" is proper English,although we tend to write it in slang "it`s". My use of punctuation respects the content of the quotations as the objects they are, although we seem to imply that "it" is spelled "it.".
- excuse-me 14y ago
  I would say mixing up its and it's is a sign of a good programmer! Apostrophe-s means a possessive most of the time, so logically belonging to it should be it's. programmers like logic, if the English language happens to have case this wrong that's their problem!
  - nirvdrum 14y ago
    I like to amuse myself thinking of people trying to use "her's," "his'," "their's," "our's," or "your's." The possessive form is pretty consistent with pronouns.
    - excuse-me 14y ago
      The reasons for those are interesting - all to do with losing cases when middle English simplified and having to fit a few borrowed Norse words into Old English's German grammar.
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  Actulay as a dyslexic I like languages which are exact without all those wierd exceptions that english has.
nessus42 14y ago
Personally, I feel that to focus on trivialities such as the difference between "it's" and "its" to be morally indefensible. It's like being unwilling to hire people who are blind or deaf, or who need a wheel chair. (Uh oh! Is "wheel chair" one word or two? Or maybe it's hyphenated–oh no! I'm going to get fired!) There are plenty of people who are quite smart and motivated, but are borderline dyslexic. Or maybe even not so borderline. For instance, I fully know the difference between "it's" and "its", and between "there", "their", and "they're". But I can stare at a paragraph for an hour and not be able to see such subtleties. Or sometimes even notsosubtle-ies. It's quite frustrating. And now I'm allegedly a poor employee to boot. Fan-fscking-tastic. On the other hand, I am rather galled whenever I drive by the restaurant named "Your's". Edit: I'd be willing to bet good money that whoever voted me down is not dyslexic. And despite making such mistakes frequently, I've often been commended for my clear writing. I received the highest grade given in several years in Creative Writing in college, got above 700 on my verbal SAT, and graduated from MIT. And yet some people want to judge me on whether I might type "it's" for "its" sometimes, and then utterly discount my opinion on that issue. Oy!
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you were downvoted for making a rather tenuous and almost insulting relationship. There's a big difference between someone with an actual disability and those that just don't care about what they write. And I don't think anyone is even advocating for a zero tolerance policy. People make mistakes all the time. But calling it a "typo" or a triviality or otherwise getting defensive really doesn't help anything. It does however suggest how you might react when a "triviality" comes up in a codebase.
  - nessus42 14y ago
    I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact that what I've written is riddled with unintended little mistakes? As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they? This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice. As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills. As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off. P.S. I do know how to use const in C++.
nessus42 14y ago
> Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. Many people with perfect grammar communicate terribly, and many people with much less than perfect grammar communicate very effectively. If effective communication is important for a job position, perhaps looking directly for that skill would be more productive and fair?
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  Effective communication is important for every job position I've ever encountered. Whether it was when I was a porter at Dunkin' Donuts, a research assistant, a cog in the wheel at Cisco, or running my own company. At the very least, you need to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of your team and usually across departments.
michaelcampbell 14y ago
> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I know the difference, and when I make a mistake I've found that every time it's been a mistake of my "finger muscle memory" when typing it rather than using the wrong word. In other words, I used the correct word, but I typed it incorrectly. That is impossible to detect on any test where the answer is typed. Perhaps a followup to these sorts of tests are, "Here are all the places you used `its` and `it's`. Do you think they are all correct, and if not, which would you change?"

irahul 14y ago

> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. Eh, how about asking me about const-correctness than inferring from my use of "it's" and "its"? You know, you can actually talk about const-correctness instead of inferring from the grammar test. > At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well. It's hard to be rash with code if you aren't copy pasting. It isn't the same as posting comments on HN. > And on a personal level I don't want to work with someone that communicates like a tween As I already said elsewhere, you are assuming things to be binary when they are not. The spectrum between "liek dis if u cry everytim" crowd and "People with bad grammar should be hanged" people is quite wide. > Quite frequently a non-native speaker will stumble upon what is written and be thoroughly confused. Not an excuse for bad grammar, but a non-native speaker is fine with both "didn't go" and "didn't went". I don't see how he is going to be confused. Non-native speakers are confused when they encounter phrases, idioms and slangs they don't know. Fun exercise - ask an Indian if he/she would like to go out with you sometime. He/she would most likely say yes/no without understanding what you meant. Do you have any examples where simple grammar mistakes confuse non-native speaker? I am a non-native speaker, and am curious to know.

nirvdrum 14y ago
While I could exhaustively ask about every aspect of every language you might have to work in, it's far simpler to use a proxy. The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. And since your job certainly isn't going to be writing code for 8 hours straight, the ability to communicate well is a good skill to have. For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself. Re: the non-native speaker part. I've had to help a lot of people out over the years on various support channels because someone wrote "then" instead of "than" or "loose" instead of "lose." Since many people seem to be able to read & write in foreign languages but not necessarily speak them, homophones are easily confused. Personally I know enough French & German to follow along with most technical materials, but easily get derailed by misspellings. Is it an idiom I'm unaware of? Is it a word I don't know? Is it some sort of slang?
- irahul 14y ago
  > The proxy in this case is your native language and seems to work rather well. No, it does not. The very notion that someone who always uses "its" and "it's" understands const-correctness is ridiculous. Command over native language doesn't signify programming prowess. You are imagining things or extrapolating your personal anecdotes to absolutes. Please provide citations if it's a proven fact. > For what it's worth, I use other aspects to proxy fit and ability as well. If you can't bother to clean up before an interview, I have a pretty reasonable idea of how you conduct yourself. What on earth does cleaning up mean? I shower in the morning. I am not going to take a special shower for you. Whether or not I shave depends on my mood. I don't see how on earth an interview with you should affect my facial hairs. I am not coming in looking like a hobo, and anything beyond that isn't your call at all. Why the hell people count on metric which doesn't indicate a person's qualities relevant to the job? Whatever the fuck happened to phone screening, checking up open source projects, on-site problem solving, having a conversation, checking up references. Where and why the fuck wearing a suit or taking a grammar test came into picture?
  - 14y ago

kamaal 14y ago

>>I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. If this is true, then apart from US and UK people who write good code don't exist elsewhere??? Its difficult to take you seriously after reading this.

urbanjunkie 14y ago
Are the US and the UK the only countries that have people who can express themselves well in their native language?
nirvdrum 14y ago
Huh? I never said you had to communicate well in English. Even in your quoted text you can see that I said "in their native language." And clever use of "its" there :-)

sampo 14y ago

As a non-native speaker of English, I have been wondering how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from the kind of sloppy grammar that is typical only for native speakers of English? [1] I learned English at school as a second language, and we would always start with the written form, and then learn how to pronounce. So my "hash table" is primarily organized based on the written form, and it would be impossible for me to mix "two" and "too", "they're" or "their" or "there", or "its" and "it's" [2]. I hadn't even realized that "too" and "two" are pronounced the same, before a native speaker pointed it out to me, as my hash table doesn't support that kind of searches. Also my native language (Finnish) uses a (nearly) phonetic writing, so phonetic misspelling of words is mainly restricted to people with no high school level of education, and who didn't do that well in primary school either. I do, like the writer of the liked article, get that feeling of sloppiness, when I see those spelling or grammar mistakes in English text, but I don't really know how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from them? I probably should not use as harsh standards as I do with Finnish, since those misspellings seem relatively common in English in the web. [1] Well, typical of people who learned spoken English before written English, but in the modern world this pretty much coincides with native speakers. [2] Well, "it's" and "its" is maybe a border case, maybe not totally impossible to mix those two, just very unlikely.

einhverfr 14y ago
This is interesting. On the other hand, I would like to know since Finnish as a language fascinates me: How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate?
- sampo 14y ago
  How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate? Nonexistent. I don't think even preschool children ever mix those. I don't have kids, so I can't say how it is with the kids who are just learning to speak. Also in English, you don't see people mixing "into" and "onto" even remotely as often as the mistakes the linked article talked about.

drivingmenuts 14y ago

Here's a thought: you're assuming I care equally about grammar and programming. If I use the wrong form of "it's" in a sentence, someone might wince somewhere (possible even rage a bit). No one is going to die. If I use the wrong form of const, it's possible that all hell will rain down upon the Earth and millions will die in horrible gut-wrenching pain, clasping their loved ones to their chest and bemoaning the gods (the desirability of such an outcome is a wholly different matter). The two issues do not equate at all. ED: fixed spelling of "grammar".

eropple 14y ago
If you don't care equally about grammar and programming, then you aren't wanted. You can no doubt latch onto a dev shop that doesn't care about that. I don't see the problem and I admire the attitude. Use of the written word is important and, aside from the exceptions mentioned in the article, I think significantly less of people who don't write or speak well. It's important to me to work with good communicators and you can't be a good communicator if you can't speak and write well.
HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
No one is going to die Since you brought it up... I am a software developer for a medical device manufacturer. Poor spelling and grammar can change the meaning of a requirement, leading to a software error. Down the road someone can certainly die. More likely, however, is that grammar and spelling errors in Requirements, Design, Procedure or other documents, or in code commit comments, or code comments themselves implies to an auditor for a Regulatory Body that our code itself is sloppy. That leads the auditor to dig deeper. Dig deep enough and you will find enough to hang someone. For just this reason, we must pay attention to proper documentation, down to appropriate word choice. No, we don't test for usage of written English during interviewing, but it's strongly enforced during day-to-day work.

gizmo686 14y ago

>"My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I tend to doubt your ability to know what form of "const" to use in C++. At the very least, lack of proofreading suggests to me you might be rash with your code as well." The difference is that const makes sense. "Its" is the plural of "it", although we seem to use "they". "It's" is the possesive of "it", although we seem to use it as "it is". "It is" is proper English,although we tend to write it in slang "it`s". My use of punctuation respects the content of the quotations as the objects they are, although we seem to imply that "it" is spelled "it.".

excuse-me 14y ago
I would say mixing up its and it's is a sign of a good programmer! Apostrophe-s means a possessive most of the time, so logically belonging to it should be it's. programmers like logic, if the English language happens to have case this wrong that's their problem!
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  I like to amuse myself thinking of people trying to use "her's," "his'," "their's," "our's," or "your's." The possessive form is pretty consistent with pronouns.
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    The reasons for those are interesting - all to do with losing cases when middle English simplified and having to fit a few borrowed Norse words into Old English's German grammar.
mjwalshe 14y ago
Actulay as a dyslexic I like languages which are exact without all those wierd exceptions that english has.

nessus42 14y ago

Personally, I feel that to focus on trivialities such as the difference between "it's" and "its" to be morally indefensible. It's like being unwilling to hire people who are blind or deaf, or who need a wheel chair. (Uh oh! Is "wheel chair" one word or two? Or maybe it's hyphenated–oh no! I'm going to get fired!) There are plenty of people who are quite smart and motivated, but are borderline dyslexic. Or maybe even not so borderline. For instance, I fully know the difference between "it's" and "its", and between "there", "their", and "they're". But I can stare at a paragraph for an hour and not be able to see such subtleties. Or sometimes even notsosubtle-ies. It's quite frustrating. And now I'm allegedly a poor employee to boot. Fan-fscking-tastic. On the other hand, I am rather galled whenever I drive by the restaurant named "Your's". Edit: I'd be willing to bet good money that whoever voted me down is not dyslexic. And despite making such mistakes frequently, I've often been commended for my clear writing. I received the highest grade given in several years in Creative Writing in college, got above 700 on my verbal SAT, and graduated from MIT. And yet some people want to judge me on whether I might type "it's" for "its" sometimes, and then utterly discount my opinion on that issue. Oy!

nirvdrum 14y ago
I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you were downvoted for making a rather tenuous and almost insulting relationship. There's a big difference between someone with an actual disability and those that just don't care about what they write. And I don't think anyone is even advocating for a zero tolerance policy. People make mistakes all the time. But calling it a "typo" or a triviality or otherwise getting defensive really doesn't help anything. It does however suggest how you might react when a "triviality" comes up in a codebase.
- nessus42 14y ago
  I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact that what I've written is riddled with unintended little mistakes? As to people caring about what they write: The litmus test should be whether they can effectively communicate, not whether they have the same arbitrary bees in their bonnets that someone else has. I might not want to hire anyone who can't give me their opinion on whether or not Frege would have discovered Godel's Incompleteness Theorem decades before Godel, if Frege hadn't been so discouraged by Russel's Paradox as to give up his entire endeavor to derive math from logic. After all, someone who hasn't put in the effort to study even the basics of modern philosophy can't be trusted to really think deeply on any issue, can they? This, no doubt, is true, but it would also be a morally indefensible hiring practice. As for making tenuous and almost insulting relationships: I find your claim that there is any correlation between having issues with "its" vs "it's" and the like, and the care with which one puts into their code, to be a tenuous and insulting claim. You're insulting my code-writing ability, and you've provided no evidence for your claim. That's pretty tenuous. You've also confounded caring with performance. Although it may or may not be the case that caring is a general personality trait that spans across all one's skills, performance can be quite different between skills. As to whether such grammatical distinctions are trivial, I assure you that they are. Having some linguistics background, I feel qualified to assert this. (MIT degree in cognitive science.) If we were to all agree today to just use "its" all the time, rather than using both "it's and "its", the world would be no worse off. P.S. I do know how to use const in C++.

nessus42 14y ago

> Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. Many people with perfect grammar communicate terribly, and many people with much less than perfect grammar communicate very effectively. If effective communication is important for a job position, perhaps looking directly for that skill would be more productive and fair?

nirvdrum 14y ago
Effective communication is important for every job position I've ever encountered. Whether it was when I was a porter at Dunkin' Donuts, a research assistant, a cog in the wheel at Cisco, or running my own company. At the very least, you need to be able to communicate effectively with the rest of your team and usually across departments.

michaelcampbell 14y ago

> My issue is if you're unable to delineate between "it's" and "its" and it's the language you've been speaking natively for the past 25 years, I know the difference, and when I make a mistake I've found that every time it's been a mistake of my "finger muscle memory" when typing it rather than using the wrong word. In other words, I used the correct word, but I typed it incorrectly. That is impossible to detect on any test where the answer is typed. Perhaps a followup to these sorts of tests are, "Here are all the places you used `its` and `it's`. Do you think they are all correct, and if not, which would you change?"