Chemistry can be very instructive for grammar. The most valuable thing one of our writers learned in his chemistry lessons wasn’t how to put his finger through a Bunsen burner flame without it hurting. Nor was it that hair really is as flammable as they say it is.
It was actually a little piece of grammatical advice that has stayed with him ever since – not least because it was so curious: ‘Stop the Crocodile’.
What his chemistry teacher was referring to was a sure-fire way of eliminating one of the more common mistakes that people, certainly in the UK, make in writing: using ‘s’ when they should be using ‘c’.
The specific grammar advice
The word in question was ‘practice’. Or was it ‘practise’?
The ‘Stop the Crocodile’ logic works like this:
- Any time you are using the verb, you use ‘s’ – like you do when you say ‘stop’. (So, I practise my grammar with exercises like this.)
- If you are using the noun, it’s a ‘c’, as in crocodile. (Grammar practice is important for schoolchildren – pity it’s no longer on the curriculum.)
Putting the specific grammar advice into practice
In fact, there is a whole host of terms that ‘Stop the Crocodile’ applies to. For instance:
- License and Licence
He may have been licensed to kill but James Bond was still booked for speeding without his licence last week. - Practise and Practice
Dr Jones liked to practise his juggling at his practice in Cheltenham. - Advise and Advice
You can advise people as much as you like but you can’t get them to listen to your advice. - Devise and device
The Greeks devised a plan using a cunning device that we call the Trojan Horse.
Can crocodiles be stopped internationally?
It seems that, unfortunately, they can’t. As with many English language rules, the spelling of words such as these changes in different parts of the globe.
For example, in America, a driving license can’t be held by a crocodile. That, after all, would be an offense.
Our best advice: get more grammar practice
Of course, ”Stop the Crocodile’ is just one of many useful insights into writing available in the Structured Writing Method. Why not get more advice like this from our eLearning courses?
Find some more handy grammar cheat sheets here:
