Record 20k people participate in Total Dictation in Tatarstan

Funny incidents of spelling and complex punctuation

On April 10, Tatarstan joined the annual All-Russian campaign 'Total Dictation'. This year, almost 20,000 residents of the republic from 8 to 90 years old have become its participants — this is a record for all 18 years of the event. For comparison, in the autumn of 2020, a little more than 11,500 people wrote dictation in the republic.

The organisers of this action in the republic have announced only preliminary results. The official results will be announced on April 25, when all the works of the participants will be fully digitised and uploaded to the portal of the All-Russian headquarters. The Russian National Cultural Society and its head, Irina Aleksandrovskaya, who are responsible for conducting the Total Dictation in the Republic of Tatarstan, complained about such a long processing of the results, explaining that “the technical capacities of the headquarters lag behind the modern reality”.

This time, those who decided to test their level of literacy and knowledge of the Russian language got one of the five parts of the story 'The Promise', written by famous writer Dmitry Glukhovsky specially for the All-Russian educational campaign. According to some participants of the dictation, the text that Tatarstan got was too complex in terms of punctuation rules and somewhat depressing in content.

Aleksandrovskaya also agreed with this, stressing that the level of complexity of the texts chosen by the staff experts for organising and conducting the All-Russian campaign has been noticeably decreasing in recent years. Even 6-7 years ago, “there were extremely difficult texts”, she said. As for the difficult points, they are mostly related to the peculiarity of the author's own language: “He is particularly fond of colons and dashes, and he himself speaks about it. Apparently, punctuation plays a special semantic role for him," Irina Aleksandrovskaya shared her opinion.

Many difficulties for those who wrote the text of Glukhovsky caused direct speech and dialogue, the speaker said.

Kazan lost the lead to Moscow

If we talk about statistics, this year Kazan has become the second in the rating among the cities participating in Total Dictation in terms of the number of participants, in the capital of Tatarstan, 6,055 people joined the action. The first — Moscow, where the dictation was participated by about 7,000 residents. Also, the top 10 cities of Russia includes Naberezhnye Chelny — 2,258 residents of the autograd became participants of the All-Russian campaign to test the knowledge of the Russian language. If we talk about other regions of the republic, the dictation on the story 'The Promise' was written by about 700 residents of the Arsky district, slightly less than 800 — Bugulminsky, and in Almetyevsk — 912 people.

This year, the organisers chose "50 bright personalities of the Republic of Tatarstan who supported our campaign” to play the role of dictating the difficult text of Glukhovsky. .

As for the sites where dictation was organised, the most numerous was the Institute of Philology, where 252 people wrote dictation at the same time, followed by the National Library of Kazan — 210 people. In total, more than 970 sites were organised on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan for writing Total Dictation, of which 250 were in Kazan. Moreover, among those who wrote it were not only Russians: 160 foreigners joined the action in Tatarstan — citizens of Latin America, Africa, China, South Korea, Armenia, Tajikistan and other countries.

Speaking about the results of Total Dictation, Irina Aleksandrovskaya, the chairperson of the Russian National Cultural Society of the Republic of Tatarstan, noted that “the result is not bad, we are very satisfied and a significant growth of participants is very pleasing to us.” The reason for the increase in the number of participants she believes to be the growing popularity of the All-Russian campaign, noting the role of the media: “Now, probably, there are few people who would not have heard about Total Dictation. People come to check their literacy.”