The “Total Dictation” campaign is intended to test the level of literacy of society. But proving that you are an excellent expert on the “great and mighty” is not so easy: dictation authors traditionally prepare traps in the form of difficult words and tricky punctuation marks. And many people fall for them... The most original mistakes are in our hit parade.
Fate turned out to be such that I had the opportunity to take part in the testing of “Total Dictation”. On a cloudy Sunday morning, teachers and graduates of the Faculty of Philology were intensively correcting mistakes and grading active citizens. This matter, it should be noted, required considerable mental effort: the first hours of work were spent in constant scientific discussions about the correctness and incorrectness of punctuation marks in the text.
The intellectual tension was interrupted from time to time by the uncontrollable laughter of one of the inspectors: this meant that another linguistic “masterpiece” had been born. We wrote down the most outstanding mistakes on the board. So, we bring to your attention the top 10 mistakes from “Total Dictation 2013”.
10th place
Perhaps the most common mistake was spelling the word “confidant” with a “t”: “thimble.” But it is interesting that the “preacher” standing next door was called by many “the righteous man” or “the preacher.”
9th place
Since the text of the dictation was dedicated to the Internet, it contained many specific words that may be unfamiliar to representatives of the older generation. So we can assume that it was they who made mistakes in the word “hacker”, presenting it in different versions: “hacker”, “hacker” and even “hacker”.
8th place
Either the text was dictated not very expressively, or the writers thought about it and made a mistake “according to Freud,” but in a number of works the sentence “The World Wide Web is becoming a tool in the hands of terrorists, hackers and fanatics of all stripes” was written like this: “The World Wide Web is becoming a tool in the hands of terrorists, hackers and fanatics of all powers.”
7th place
Despite the fact that the age of the participants was not indicated in the dictation questionnaire, “born in the USSR” was indicated by the spelling of the words “communism” and “revolution” with a capital letter. But in this case, respect for this political system did not save us: for “Communism” we mercilessly put a red tick in the margin and counted as an error.
6th place
Someone misheard, someone misunderstood, as a result of which the philologists saw “the entire peaceful network” (instead of the “World Wide Web”) and the Internet, which “lies in the background” (lying, in fact, “at the core”).
5th place
This is where those very trap words begin, apparently terrifying to hear and unimaginable to write. For example, “vulgarization”. It would seem that the word “vulgar” is well known and does not present any particular difficulties. But no, there were originals who wrote “vulgurization of culture” and “gulgurization of culture.”
4th place
As it turns out, the word “unprecedented” looks and sounds even scarier—it’s no coincidence that Dina Rubina included it in her text. The dictation participants offered a variety of spelling options, but we were most impressed by “without precedent” and “without precedent.”
3rd place
The list of “terrible words” ends with the seemingly short, but very dangerous word “too much.” In addition, it occurs right in the penultimate sentence of the text, when the writers run out of strength. At the end of the test, the option “too much” no longer surprised anyone, but “too much”, “too much” and “too much” clearly attracted attention.
2nd place
We award the honorary “silver” (you won’t believe it!) to the capital of Greece. Yes, Athens, which one participant saw fit to write as “Athens.”
1 place
The greatest joy for those checking the dictation was when the participants wrote the title of the text: “The dangers of heavenly tabernacles.” Of course, the word “tabernacles” is not familiar to everyone, and therefore many have decided to replace it with the more common “thickets” and “forests.” But what was the surprise of philologists when, in several works in a row, they came across the title “Features of Paradise”...
But, to tell the truth, the text of the dictation was quite difficult. Of the 3,470 people who took part in the action in our city, 17 received “A” grades. In total, 32,280 people wrote the dictation, 2,564 of whom were written abroad.
Alena Yudina, Information Department of Regional CIT
Photo illustration from the archives of the Information Department of the Regional Center for Information Technology
– When you saw the text, did you note potentially dangerous moments for yourself? Which words immediately became clear: they would be misspelled?
“Some of our expectations were confirmed, but others, to our great joy, were not.” For example, we expected many errors in the word “art,” but those who wrote the Total Dictation had practically none. This suggests that this word is well learned within the framework of the Russian language school course. I emphasize that we do not draw conclusions “in general,” not “on average,” but only on the basis of the work of the participants in the action, and this is the most literate and active part of the nation.
The next word is “subsequently”, in which there were errors, but still their number was not catastrophic, which also shows a good level of mastering vocabulary words at school.
– There were words with a hyphen; they usually cause difficulties.
– Yes, it turned out to be difficult, for example, the word in ancient Egyptian, since to write it correctly you must simultaneously remember three rules. The first rule is to write hyphenated adverbs with a prefix By- and suffix -And. I think that in words like in Turkish there would be practically no errors, since the structure of this word is transparent: from the adjective Turkish formed adverb in Turkish using the attachment By- and suffix -And.
This rule is known so well that it is extended to other phenomena. For example, in the same text of the Total Dictation there was the word simpler, which many wrote with a hyphen, most likely by analogy with the rule for adverbs. But simpler is a form of comparative degree adjective (simple – easier – simpler), so the rule for it is adverbs does not apply. Prefix in a word simpler denotes a weak degree of manifestation of the characteristic and is written together.
The second rule that must be remembered for the correct spelling of a word in ancient Egyptian, is a rule for the continuous writing of adjectives formed from phrases based on a subordinating connection. Adverb in ancient Egyptian derived from an adjective ancient egyptian, and it, in turn, comes from the name of the state Ancient Egypt, which is a phrase built on the basis of a subordinating connection: Egypt(Which?) - Ancient(word Ancient depends on the word Egypt, obeys him). Such adjectives are written together, unlike adjectives like black and white or meat and dairy, formed on the basis of a coordinating connection that presupposes the equality of concepts (cf. black and white, meat and dairy).
And finally, the third rule: writing adjectives formed from proper names with a capital or lowercase letter. Adjective ancient egypt sk th is written with a lowercase letter, since it contains the suffix -sk-. Wed. with adjectives Shaft in , Mish in , which are also formed from proper names, but are written with a capital letter, because they include another suffix - -in.
Each of these rules individually is well known, but the application of their complex causes difficulties.
– The same as a combination of punctuation marks?
– Indeed, the most errors appear in those places where two signs must be placed at the same time, for example, a comma and a dash, and each of the signs must be placed according to its own rule. These difficulties are associated with the need to simultaneously apply two or three rules, and such cases are practically not practiced in school grammar, since at school one must have time to learn at least the core of the rules, and there is no time left for their various combinations.
The combination of different rules, in general, is self-evident, you just need to remember that the confluence of two signs is possible, despite the fact that this often frightens writers, they often ask the question: “Can two signs stand next to each other at the same time?” Yes, they can, and even should, since each of them is responsible for their own area. In the first part of this year’s Total Dictation there was the following example: ...Sophocles decided to attract actors who could play his works - this is how the theater was born. In it it was necessary to put a comma before the dash, closing the subordinate clause who could play his works, and the dash - according to the rule of a non-union complex sentence, the second part of which begins with a demonstrative pronoun So.
– What mistakes were unexpected for you? I read that in the dictation a strangeness manifested itself in a strange way: flights, orena, excitement...
– Such errors, in my opinion, are a logical continuation of one of the basic “rules” of Russian spelling - “write not what you hear.” True, in this case it is impossible to apply the continuation of this rule: if you doubt what should be written, check it, put it under emphasis. This rule applies to native Russian words, and words arena, excitement, athlete borrowed from other languages, they are not required to obey the rules of the Russian language.
The rule of checking vowels in the root of a word is the most frequent rule in all texts without exception: in order to write a word correctly nepr O stop, you need to put the corresponding vowel in the stressed position - etc O one hundred. In words athlete, arena, excitement This, of course, is impossible to do, since in these borrowed words the vowels are unverifiable, but just in case, the writers are apparently playing it safe and writing “not what they hear.”
There are always a lot of mistakes in borrowed words, since the spelling of these words must be memorized; they are not subject to the rules of the Russian language, which are intuitively understandable to everyone. And if they are rare in the practice of every writer, then there is simply no way to remember them, especially if they are not specially practiced at school, if they do not belong to the category of words that are usually taken into the frame for memorization.
There was an annoying mistake in spelling the names of states Ancient Greece And Ancient Egypt, when some protesters wrote the first word with a lowercase letter. Many were indignant that this was a “not quite spelling” error, but in fact it was a spelling error: the spelling of such words is regulated by the rule for writing the names of states. No one will probably dispute the spelling of the names of modern states, such as Russian Federation, USA, United Arab Emirates etc., where each word is written with a capital letter. The names of ancient states are no different from the names of modern states. It is doubly annoying to encounter such errors, since the history of ancient states is studied in quite detail at school; it would seem that this knowledge should form an integral part of the elementary educational standard of every school graduate.
And this is where the question arises about the scope of the concept “literate person”: how does the modern understanding of “literacy” differ from that recorded in dictionaries? In dictionaries, the word “literate” is defined only as “able to read and write.” But this ability does not surprise anyone in our country today; everyone in our country, without exception, can read and write, since the law on universal secondary education provides this opportunity. This began to be perceived as a natural state of affairs, therefore, in the minds of modern people, the concept of “literate” began to be filled with meanings that were not reflected in dictionaries. “Literate” is a person who not only knows how to read and write, but who does it without errors, at a high level, recognizes subtle shades of meaning embedded in texts, and has a broad outlook.
– I once wrote a column called. It is about the fact that many native speakers are very aggressive towards those who make mistakes. Every now and then they propose to imprison everyone, or even shoot them, for confusion with put on, For example. Why do you think people react so painfully to mistakes?
– First of all, there is no need to write about this so often, such phenomena are spontaneous, isolated, it is not such people who create the atmosphere of universal hatred, but the journalists who exaggerate these phenomena. There are many more people who truly care about literacy: these are, first of all, school teachers, many, many journalists and philologists who host relevant programs on TV, radio, and in magazine and newspaper columns. It’s better to write about them; their contribution is much more significant and positive than a separate outburst of aggression, which, most likely, is a continuation of an individual’s disappointment in life in general, in all its manifestations.
These are just unfortunate people who are afraid to throw out their aggression on other people, since they will probably get a rebuff, they don’t get into a fight, they just swear on the Internet, most often anonymously, throwing out the harmfulness of their character into a language that cannot answer them in any way , and he doesn’t need to, since he is great and powerful and will not suffer from such attacks.
– I don’t agree with you about aggression: unfortunately, this is not a separate surge, but a constant phenomenon. Vladimir Pakhomov, editor-in-chief of Gramota.ru, confirms this; he constantly receives letters asking him to shoot for coffee neuter and so on. That’s exactly what they write: shoot, imprison.
That’s why I wrote the column so that people could look at themselves from the outside.
– It seems to me that Total Dictation is a much more widespread phenomenon than individual aggressive antics. I think that the popularity of the action is that the vast majority of people perceive language as an absolute value, as a way of cultural self-identification that ensures a comfortable existence: this is a guarantee that you are correctly understood, that your communicative intentions are correctly recognized in the community, this, in after all, an opportunity to maintain the purity of one’s native language, perhaps thereby even demonstrating one’s patriotism.
– What mistakes are you intolerant of?
– I am tolerant of any mistakes, even swear words (not to be confused with foul language as a form of offensive behavior!), because many of them are a continuation of the system, existing as part of the language in all its diversity.
The question is what counts as a “mistake.” If the notorious “rings” and “coffee” are neuter, then these are not errors, but a reflection of the patterns inherent in the language system itself. They are recognized as “mistakes” by people who try to normalize the possible areas of use of certain words or forms; they attach evaluative labels to them: this is “high,” this is “low,” this is “acceptable in the speech of an educated person,” but this is not. There are no errors in the language itself; there are violations of the rules established by people, but such violations also happen in road traffic. There, for some mistakes, the license is taken away, but for mistakes in spelling words they don’t even charge a fine.
– How literate are modern students? And are they interested in language?
– Students are the most literate part of our society. To enter a university, they must not only pass the Unified State Exam in Russian, but receive a score in accordance with the high bar set by universities.
And the fact that they are certainly interested in language is proven by Total Dictation. This is a student event, not a philological one: it was invented by students, carried out by students, and philologists only support them. This interest in language is burning all over the world, on all continents, because it is students who, completely voluntarily and disinterestedly, on the best spring days, when they can do something completely different, organize the Total Dictation, its testing, and testing is not just a one-time an event where you can come, have fun and leave, but this is painstaking work that takes many days, very intense, since it needs to be carried out in a very short time and in very large volumes. Nobody forces them; their activities are not motivated by anything other than love for their native language. What more could you want from today's youth? Participation in the Total Dictation brings me into a state of euphoria: literacy is what is of interest to our students on a massive scale now.
– Why is dictation a fun, exciting flash mob for the participants of your action, but one of the most boring genres for schoolchildren in the classroom? How to make Russian lessons in schools interesting?
– If dictation in schools was such a boring activity, no one would take a dictation with the terrifying name “Total”. This means that it wasn’t so bad to do it at school, since people still write dictations with joy.
It all depends on the personality of the teacher: you can talk about the same thing in a boring and uninteresting way, or you can talk about it in an exciting and exciting way, and it doesn’t matter at all what the story is about. This means that most teachers conduct dictations in such a way that you want to write them again and again. If such a large number of people are so passionate about their native language, it means that they learned this love from school. Otherwise, where does this attitude come from? Total dictation only picked up this love, and it was formed at school.
– This time the Total Dictation was written on all six continents. Usually the Russian language of those who have not lived in Russia for a long time is special, it differs from ours. Accordingly, people make mistakes because they do not use the language as often as we do. Where were there more mistakes - in Russia or abroad?
– We NEVER compare ANYONE with each other. This is a condition for the Total Dictation: the action is voluntary and anonymous. Anonymity also extends to continents.
– Not everyone likes the words “total” and “dictator”. Do you think that during the time that the action has existed, these words have been somehow “whitewashed”?
– There is nothing bad in these words, they do not need any “whitewashing”. They are not liked by those who do not know the meaning of the word “total” (“universal”) and confuse it with the word “totalitarian.” The majority understands these comic nominations and reacts to them adequately.
Maybe someone is suspicious of such words because they forget that this is a fun youth event. Novosibirsk people generally like to play with words. So, we have another event called “Monstration”. Someone might think that some “monsters” take part in it, but in fact it is the same fun youth entertainment that takes place on May 1st as a nostalgia for the Soviet May Day demonstrations, and it gathers young people who go out to celebration with slogans like “My brother is being forced to eat porridge. Freedom for children! If you are afraid of everything, then such a slogan may seem dangerous.
So is the word “dictator” - it arose simply because the language does not have a special name for a person dictating a text at the same time to a large number of... who? What should we call the participants in this action: “dictators”, “dictators”, “dictators”? We still do not have a word for those who write the text of the Total Dictation under dictation. At school, dictations are written by schoolchildren, but in the framework of the Total Dictation, who? Maybe they are “totalitarians”? It would be nice to give this word a less threatening meaning.
– If we talk about dictators, then I have come across a funny version of “dictun”. But he is, of course, a joke.
– The word “dictator” within the framework of our action acquired a new meaning: “one who reads the text of the Total Dictation,” although it did not “soften” its meaning: the text must be written down word for word, without deviating from the original version. This is probably also a form of dictation, since a free retelling does not count as the text of the Total Dictation.
Perhaps, over time, this meaning of the word “dictator” will be included in dictionaries, along with its original meaning: “an unlimited ruler temporarily elected by the people to pacify internal unrest or to fight an external enemy; personally, when the need has passed, resigning from his duties and reporting to the people in all his actions...” (Complete dictionary of foreign words that have come into use in the Russian language. Popov M., 1907). In my opinion, this word has a very good meaning. Unfortunately, its second meaning has become more active - “also a person who generally arbitrarily and autocratically disposes of something, is not authorized by anyone to do this and neglects the orders and desires of his equals.”
But it depends on us which words we use most often and in what meanings. And we are afraid not of the words themselves, but of the phenomena that we associate with them. But these are temporary associations that arose at a certain stage in the historical development of our state, and in Ancient Rome, I think, no one was afraid of this word. The fears of the era of totalitarianism will be forgotten, and with them the meanings of many words will be perceived as completely neutral.
– What words would you use to reassure those who believe that we have all become completely illiterate and that the language is dying?
– My main specialty is field linguistics, I study the languages of the peoples of Siberia, many of which are endangered, so I observe situations when it is believed that a particular language is about to disappear, but it turns out that even those languages in which says 200 people, they don’t give up so easily.
For example, 25 years ago I worked with one informant in a small Khanty village (Khanty are a Finno-Ugric people living in the lower reaches of the Ob River). She had a daughter, then a young girl, about whom her mother said that the trouble was, she didn’t know her native language at all, and then we didn’t even consider the possibility of working with this girl, because we doubted that we could get reliable information from her. And so I came to the same village 25 years later, that informant of ours was no longer alive, we met her daughter, and it turned out that she was the most complete speaker of her native language!
Compared to the representatives of the older generation, it may seem that young people speak wrong and think wrong, but when the older generation leaves, it turns out that traditions are being successfully passed on, maybe something is lost, but the language is also enriched. In addition, knowledge accumulates with age, and it is impossible to compare the language competence of an elderly and a young person. For example, I graduated from school with a “B” in my Russian language certificate. But I received a philological education, and my literacy level, of course, increased, but this took many years and a lot of work. Therefore, it is premature to blame young people for anything.
I compare myself in my student years and today's students. And the comparison is not in my favor. Today's students are definitely more educated and have a much broader outlook: many of them have already seen the world, read a lot of things that I didn’t even suspect about in my student years. I entered the university in 1980. We did not know emigrant literature; “The Master and Margarita”, Strugatsky or Solzhenitsyn were read (and even then only by those who could get them with great difficulty) in samizdat, in blind “fifth” copies, under the strictest secrecy, passing on to each other these copies, literally read to holes, printed on tissue paper. Nowadays, completely different skills and abilities are in demand, many of which my peers have never mastered.
Of course, we may decide not to speak Russian, or some catastrophic circumstances will force us to give it up. But will we be able to suddenly switch to any other language en masse? Imagine: starting tomorrow you have to speak some other language. Is it possible?
Even people who have lived abroad for many years cannot get rid of their accent, the combination of words always reveals a foreigner, these are all traces of our native language, which we cannot get rid of so easily, even if we try very hard, we cannot so easily throw off our native language and dress up in the prestigious attire of any other language. These are such deep mechanisms that can disappear only when there is physically not a single person left on the entire globe who speaks Russian. But for this to happen, cataclysms on a universal scale must occur. Let's hope that they do not threaten us in the foreseeable and very distant future.
ALL PHOTOS
In Yekaterinburg, the results of the international event "Total Dictation" that took place on April 18 were summed up: only 1% of those who wanted to test their knowledge of the Russian language wrote the proposed passage with an "excellent" rating - 21 people out of 1,854 who came. How many residents of the Urals who participated in the cultural event received twos, threes and fours is not disclosed according to the rules of the exam, Uralinformburo reports.
This year, participants in the “Total Dictation” wrote a text called “The Magic Lantern,” created by St. Petersburg writer Evgeny Vodolazkin and representing an artistic sketch of the life of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.
As Ksenia Semenyuk, coordinator of the event in Yekaterinburg, said at a press conference, the results of writing the dictation were within the normal range - usually the number of excellent students ranges from 1% to 3%. In turn, Marina Babikova, assistant vice-rector for scientific and innovative activities of the Ural State Pedagogical University, spoke about a kind of “anti-record” of the action - one of the participants in the “Total Dictation” made 273 mistakes in 280 words that made up the passage.
“When checking, it looked something like he was writing a dictation with a red pen, and we checked it with a blue one,” Babikova said, as quoted by Interfax. “We encountered this for the first time and at first assumed that he was not Russian by nationality and this was not his native language, but through research and all sorts of discussions we came to the conclusion that he was, after all, Russian,” she added.
However, from a scan of a dictation written by a “record holder for errors” and posted on the Komsomolskaya Pravda website, one can rather draw the opposite conclusion - the peculiarities of writing the letters of the Russian alphabet and some words suggest that it was written by a foreigner.
The teachers carefully hide the name of this person; they only call his gender - male. It is also known that the young man wrote dictation at the Ural Pedagogical University.
“This, of course, is a unique case. My colleagues and I discussed this work today and could not find any explanation for such blatant illiteracy,” Ksenia Semenyuk, coordinator of the “Total Dictation” in Yekaterinburg, told KP. According to her, the text contained every type of error imaginable, but, for example, the examinee wrote the complex word “something” correctly.
In turn, the head of the “Total Dictation” group of the USPU admitted to journalists that the examiners “almost in unison” checked this text. “The person has an absolute F. We don’t think this is a joke. This was most likely written by a person for whom Russian is not his native language. The errors are mainly of the “what I hear, I write” category. There are practically no punctuation errors. This namely spelling,” she noted. “The man simply doesn’t know the Russian language. But he came and wrote the text to the end. In any case, he’s great!” - summed up the head of the group.
As it became known, three more participants of the “Total Dictation”, who came to the site of the Ural State Pedagogical University, decided to approach the task creatively and wrote not a dictation, but an essay on a free topic.
Representatives of the Yekaterinburg organizing committee spoke in detail about the assessments only based on the results of the dictation written by Sverdlovsk journalists, notes New Region. “Out of 25 journalists, one received an “excellent” rating, 40% of those who wrote had a satisfactory result, and 28% each scored “good” and “unsatisfactory,” said Ksenia Semenyuk.
As Marina Babikova, assistant vice-rector for scientific and innovative activities at the Ural State Pedagogical University, explained, this year the number of participants in Yekaterinburg was somewhat smaller than expected. In her opinion, the popularity of the action has decreased due to the lack of “proper coverage” and advertising. She also noted that this year the dictation was popular among middle-aged people, while in 2014 the participants were mainly young people.
The most errors were in the words “half-ear” and “half-turn”
According to Ksenia Semenyuk, the adverbs “half-ear” and “half-turn” caused the greatest difficulties for Yekaterinburg residents, Interfax reports. “More than 70% of those who took part in this year’s dictation made mistakes in spelling these words,” she noted. In addition, the protesters made mistakes in the words “gramophone”, “oarlock” and “checkered”. It was also difficult to write adjectives with the prefix “not” - “invisible”, “unobvious”, “incomprehensible”.
The adverbs “half-heartedly” and “half-turned,” the writing of which is included in the Unified State Examination program, also caused difficulties for other participants in the “Total Dictation” in different regions of the Russian Federation. This was stated last Wednesday by experts checking the texts.
“Two words turned out to be the leaders in errors. In the second part of the dictation, this is the word “half-heartedly,” where almost 71% of those who wrote made mistakes, and in the third part the word “half-turned,” where 78% of those who wrote made a mistake. This is quite strange and for us in what way “to an unexpected degree,” the chairman of the action’s expert commission, philologist Natalya Koshkareva, told reporters, as quoted by RIA Novosti.
“Most likely, the situation is due to the fact that this rule competes with another rule for writing nouns like “half-ear”, “half-turn” with a hyphen if the second part of the word begins with a vowel, and the adverbs “half-ear” and “half-turn” must written together. That is, the rule for nouns is well remembered, but such adverbs are exceptions, and they are remembered less well,” Koshkareva said.
“We expected that the largest number of errors would be in obsolete words, such as “gramophone,” but our expectations were not confirmed. In that word, only 7% made mistakes. That is, the idea that obsolete words cause difficulties was not justified here ", said the expert.
Also, according to her, mistakes were often made in the words “invisible,” “incomprehensible,” and “not obvious.” For these words, the error rate was 32%. Koshkareva noted that these errors are traditional and are associated with a complex rule for writing “not” particles together and separately.
As for punctuation, in the text of the dictation there were adverbs “at the same time”, “in general”, which should not be set off with commas, but the writers mistakenly took them for introductory words and set them off with commas. The word “in general” stands out sharply from this series. This adverbial combination also should not be separated by commas, but 70% of those who wrote put commas around it.
According to Koshkareva, philologists expected massive errors in the verb “burns” due to the spread of this word in Internet slang, but only a few made errors in the word.
"Total Dictation" is an annual educational event in the form of a voluntary dictation for everyone. The purpose of the event is to give every person the opportunity to test their knowledge of the Russian language and awaken interest in improving literacy. The idea of voluntary dictation for everyone arose at Novosibirsk State University. Over the 12 years of its existence, “Total Dictation” has turned into a large-scale international event. In total, 93.7 thousand people in 58 countries and 549 cities took part in the “Total Dictation” this year. In Russia, 84.3 thousand people wrote the dictation in 79 regions.
Novosibirsk residents wrote the first Total Dictation in 2004. Then the student club “Gloom Club” of the Faculty of Humanities of NSU, headed by the president of the club, Ekaterina Kosykh, proposed the idea of organizing a mass dictation. Only 150 people took part in it.
The first 6 dictations were written in Novosibirsk within the walls of Novosibirsk State University, the texts were borrowed from the works of Russian classics. In 2009, 618 Novosibirsk residents had their knowledge of the Russian language tested. Of these, only seven lucky students received an “excellent” grade. 118 people received “good” ratings, 254 received “satisfactory” ratings, but only 239 volunteers received “2” grades. In the name of fairness, it should be noted that he offered an excerpt from the story “Nevsky Prospekt” by Gogol, which can hardly be considered correct, because the great Russian writer with Little Russian ethnic roots had too peculiar vocabulary and syntax. He is too far from Chekhov and Bunin.
Internet to help
At the same time, the mobile Internet became publicly available, and It became clear that any text from the classics can be found on the Internet and copied directly into dictation. The organizers realized that this was possible when in one of the works that claimed an A, they discovered extra sentences that were in the text of the work, but they were not in the dictation text offered to the participants. There was a need to create unique texts that would not be published on the Internet until the Total Dictation took place. The author of the first text, written specifically for TD, was the famous writer Boris Strugatsky. His text entitled “What is the reason for the decline of the Russian language and does it exist at all?” 2,600 Novosibirsk residents took dictation. The science fiction writer's text consisted of only 330 words, but the participants in the Total Dictation then set a record for the number of errors.
Interest and the desire to test their literacy encourage them to take part in a mass action. Photo from pixabay.com
Of the 2,600 people who tested their literacy, only 20 received “excellent,” 570 received “good,” and 1,000 received “satisfactory.” And a thousand people wrote a dictation with a bad mark. It was then that controversy began around the “Total Dictation”. Boris Strugatsky, no one argues, the writer was authoritative. But still the text from the pen of a science fiction writer came out slightly clumsy and boring. For the sake of objectivity: Boris Natanovich wrote his best works many years ago in collaboration with his brother, a military translator and editor. The expression “thank God” caused enormous controversy at the time.
“It would be better if it wasn’t in the text at all, and here’s why,” says Novosibirsk philologist Marina Senatorova. – In the Soviet years, the word “god” in school and in all newspapers was written with a small letter in all cases. Nowadays, the word “God” is capitalized to mean one supreme being. In numerous stable combinations used outside of direct connection with religion, a lowercase letter should be written: God knows, God bless him, as God puts it in his heart. However, in some cases the choice of spelling depends on the context. So, it can be written “thank God” (if the context indicates that the speaker thanks the Lord God) and “thank God” (if the context makes it clear that a common colloquial expression is used). Total, that is, universal, dictation is written by everyone, including believers. And for them it is natural to write the word “God” with a capital letter, this is how they perceive this very context. They try not to take the name of God in vain. Strugatsky himself, for example, in the text of the dictation wrote “Language” with a capital letter, giving this word additional meaning. And believers, of which there are many, always attach additional meaning to the word “God.” The end result is massive errors.
Another controversial point in Strugatsky’s text is closely related to this case: “Bulgakovs, Chekhovs, Tolstoys.” Almost every student knows: proper names of persons, which have turned into common nouns, are written with a lowercase letter: philanthropist, ladies' man, gigolo, dezhimorda. However, capitalization is retained if the surname, when used in a common noun, does not become a common noun. Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Chekhov are great writers, and they, of course, represent a certain type of people, but still their names have by no means lost their individual meaning, and therefore should definitely have been written with a capital letter, unless the author uses them in a contemptuous, contemptuous manner. derogatory meaning.
Girls are better than text
“For many years I knew about “Total Dictation” and knew the people who wrote it,” says Novosibirsk writer Alexander Dukhnov. - "Just wondering"; “I want to test my literacy”; “Just to hang out,” is the answer that makes the most sense to me. The spirit of a flash mob hovers over the Total Dictation - to gather in an inappropriate place and collectively do something ridiculous. Dictation for fun - what could be more ridiculous? I'm an honest person, and I have nothing to hide. In Russian I have a “troika”, which tends to be a very indecent grade. Once, my friends and I came to Narkhoz to write and subsequently laugh at the results and at each other. Here, along the way, a large number of pretty students were discovered. The dictation itself seemed rather boring in content to me. The author Zakhar Prilepin was there all the time screwing in some light bulbs in the entrance, trying to begin with himself the restructuring of the collective consciousness. And it’s quite a decent event. The girls turned out to be better than the text.
Every year the number of participants Total dictation is growing. Photo from pixabay.com
In 2011, Dmitry Bykov became the author of the text for the Total Dictation. He, like Strugatsky, will share his thoughts on the state of the language. Bykov came to Novosibirsk on purpose. Then the action went beyond Novosibirsk: people in eleven Russian regions and even several people in the USA took part in it. In Novosibirsk, 2,695 people wrote the dictation, 47 of them received “excellent”. However, the most widespread mark was still a “two”: more than half of the participants could not satisfactorily cope with writing the text proposed by Bykov.
“Then the writing of the expression “Moscow University” caused controversy, and this is partly the author’s fault,” continues philologist Marina Senatorova. – The text for a literacy test should not contain controversial options, and this is just such a case. From the context it was clear that we were talking specifically about Moscow State University: therefore, a capital letter was needed. But these days there are many universities, people of different ages and worldly experience write dictations, they test knowledge exclusively of grammar: this means that the text must be impeccable from this point of view. If we assume that we are talking about one of many Moscow universities, a lowercase letter is required.
According to Bykov, he composed the text of the dictation in 20-30 minutes, which is funny, but hardly evokes respect among responsible and self-critical people. It would be necessary to be more careful.
On six continents
In 2014, the text for “Total Dictation” was written by the Ural prose writer Alexey Ivanov. He speaks a huge amount of Russian vocabulary and is sincerely passionate about the history of his native land. At the same time, Konstantin Khabensky, Andrei Makarevich, Maxim Krongauz, Andrei Konstantinov, Natalya Krachkovskaya, Seva Novgorodtsev and other popular personalities acted as “dictators”.
In 2014, “Total Dictation” was written on six continents, in 352 cities, in 47 countries near and far abroad. 64 thousand native Russian speakers decided to test their literacy – this is more than two times more than in 2013. The northernmost point of the dictation was Dikson in Taimyr, and the southernmost point was the Antarctic scientific station “Vostok”. The westernmost point was San Jose (California, USA), and the easternmost point was Auckland (New Zealand). The event was attended by a member of the crew of the International Space Station, pilot-cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev - after all, the dictation was written on Cosmonautics Day. The leaders in the number of participants among foreign cities were Bishkek, Talin, Pavlodar and Riga.
Literacy and erudition are in fashion today. Photo from pixabay.com
About 2 thousand out of 64 thousand people did an excellent job with the dictation: this is a little more than 3%. 2% of the participants received “A” marks. The organizers believe that the improvement in results was due, firstly, to the high literary quality of the dictation text of that time, and secondly, to the work of the free “Russian on Fridays” courses, which were attended by more than fifteen thousand applicants in many cities.
In Novosibirsk, 4,509 people passed the dictation, including 196 excellent students, that is, 4.3 percent, which is much higher than the general level. Common errors traditionally included the spelling of “n” and “nn” in suffixes and the prefixes “pre-” and “pri-”. The most errors were made in the words “platform”, “semaphore”, “front garden”, “accordion” and “razhristanny”.
The phrase “Chusovsky station” also caused difficulty – should the word “Chusovsky” be written with a capital or small letter? In Ivanov’s text, “Chusovsky station” is written with a small letter, because in this case it is not a compound name: the old station is long gone, and it is not known what its official name was. Here it is simply an adjective formed from a geographical name like “Neva banks”, “Don Cossacks”, “Moscow streets”.
Let us add that in 2018 it will take place on Saturday, April 14, and will begin at 15.00 Novosibirsk time. . By the way, you should hurry up with registration - the number of places at some sites is limited.
2004 – Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace.”
2005 – Alexander Bek, “Volokolamsk Highway”.
2006 – Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, “Taimyr Lake”.
2007 – Vasil Bykov, “Sotnikov”.
2008 – Rudyard Kipling, “Naulaka: Stories of the West and the East.”
2009 – Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospekt”.
2010 – Boris Strugatsky.
2011 – Dmitry Bykov.
2012 – Zakhar Prilepin.
2013 – Dina Rubina.
2014 – Alexey Ivanov.
2015 – Evgeny Vodolazkin.
2016 – Andrey Usachev.
2017 – Leonid Yuzefovich.