RTFM — Read the F#@%ing Manual
or, Read Your Exercise Instructions
We all know how important good grammar is. Especially if you study English as a foreign language and want to (or need to) pass a language exam. You need to study, practise, revise — and then ‘lather, rinse & repeat’, as the shampoo bottle instructions advise. Speaking of instructions — no matter how perfectly you master a skill, you can still fail an exam if you don’t pay close attention to the instructions.
Written examinations are especially problematic in this regard — sometimes you just glance at the task at hand and what you should be doing seems so obvious that you don’t even bother reading the task description. Whereas, during oral examinations it’s almost not even an option not to listen to the examiner’s instruction (although if you do not, then the consequences tend to be even worse as humiliation comes into the mix). So, back to written exams, sometimes you fill out the task according to what you believe it to be when in reality the instructions say something completely different. If you are lucky, you realise your mistake before handing the test in and having it graded. Otherwise…
In Engramo English, reading the instructions carefully is just as important. We do try to help you tell the exercise types apart by giving each one its own set of graphical features but there are minor variations between the specific tasks even within an exercise type and you have to look for these variations in the Exercise Introduction on the top of every page. For example, in Fill-In exercises, you are presented with (you guessed it) a gap to fill in. However, there are several versions of this exercise type and if you hurry and skip the Exercise Introduction, you might miss the fact that some sentences (or all, or none) on a particular mission page could be intended to be left as they are, without any filling in needed. You can tell easily by reading the instructions:
Fill in the gap. vs Fill in the gap if necessary. Otherwise, press “No answer required”.
The good thing is that the app does not grade your performance, which means that you would not be penalised for failing a set of exercises like that. However, in doing so, you would hinder your learning progress because the algorithm would see your incorrect answers and assess them as a lack of knowledge of those topics. And topics in which you perform poorly tend to appear more often in your missions because you seem to need more practice with them, disregarding the fact that it was not a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of attention that led to your failing the task.
Another point in reading instructions is that if you make that your habit, you will also read the explanations — the bite-sized grammar rules around which Engramo English is built. No textbook and no other app gives you such clear-cut explanations of the grammar, a fact we are proud of because this is the way Engramo English was designed.
