English for Code Reviews
Practical English for pull requests and code reviews, organized as a small curriculum: commit subjects and PR titles, PR descriptions, the grammar that trips up non-native speakers (articles, uncountable nouns, prepositions, verb patterns), review vocabulary and abbreviations (nit, LGTM, PTAL, WIP, non-blocking), phrasal verbs, softening comments without losing clarity, replying to reviews as an author, and the confusable word pairs that show up in review threads.
Questions
- Not answered. Which commit subject follows the conventional imperative mood?
- Not answered. Complete the Git documentation test: "If applied, this commit will ___ the flaky retry test." Type the base form of the verb removed.
- Not answered. Which subject line follows the classic Git style conventions (plain style, no Conventional Commits prefix)?
- Not answered. Which PR title is most useful to reviewers and future readers of the history?
- Not answered. A PR is titled "Bump
zodto 4.2". What does bump mean here? - Not answered. Which tense is conventional for describing what a pull request does?
- Not answered. Choose the connector that expresses purpose: "Cache the parsed schema ___ we don't re-read it on every request."
- Not answered. Choose the correct abbreviation: "Use a stable kebab-case id (___,
user-profile-card)." - Not answered. Select every sentence that is grammatically acceptable in a PR's "Testing" section.
- Not answered. Which sentence avoids the dangling modifier?
- Not answered. "The
timeoutandretriesoptions default to30and3, respectively." What does respectively tell the reader? - Not answered. Fill in the blank: "I found ____ bug in the export logic." Type the missing article.
- Not answered. Which sentence is grammatically correct?
- Not answered. Which sentence is grammatically correct?
- Not answered. Select every noun that is uncountable in English.
- Not answered. Fill in the blank: "Could you follow ___ same naming pattern as in
parseQuiz?" Type the missing article. - Not answered. Choose the correct pair: "After the refactor we have ___ files and ___ duplication."
- Not answered. You want to state a general truth in a design discussion. Which sentence does it correctly?
- Not answered. Fill in the blank: "Whether Options are shuffled depends ___ the Renderer, not the Standard." Type the missing preposition.
- Not answered. Choose the correct preposition: "Please keep the error format consistent ___ the rest of the codebase."
- Not answered. Choose the correct pair: "The fix lives ___ the
seed/cssbranch, ___ thevalidatemodule." - Not answered. Which sentence is grammatically correct?
- Not answered. Choose the correct completion: "Could you explain the tradeoff ___?"
- Not answered. Select every grammatically correct sentence.
- Not answered. Fill in the blank: "This function ___ an empty array when no Question matches." Type the correct form of return.
- Not answered. In a review comment, what does the prefix "nit:" signal?
- Not answered. In review shorthand, what does "LGTM" stand for? Type the four words.
- Not answered. A teammate comments "PTAL" on your PR after you pushed changes. What are they saying?
- Not answered. What does the "WIP" prefix in a PR title stand for? Type the three words.
- Not answered. A PR description starts with a "TL;DR:" line. What does the abbreviation literally stand for?
- Not answered. A reviewer writes: "non-blocking: consider caching this lookup." What does it mean for the author?
- Not answered. A teammate says "let's not bikeshed the parameter name." What is bikeshedding?
- Not answered. "The release broke checkout, so we had to roll it back." What did the team do?
- Not answered. "Just a heads-up: this will conflict with the refactor in #42." What kind of message is this?
- Not answered. "As of v2.0,
parse()is deprecated." What does as of mean? - Not answered. Which sentence is grammatically correct?
- Not answered. Choose the correct form: "Please ___ the branch and test locally."
- Not answered. Choose the correct form: "I'll address the naming in a ___ PR."
- Not answered. Which phrasings soften a review comment while keeping the request clear?
- Not answered. You want to understand why the author chose a mutex. Which question asks for the reasoning without sounding accusatory?
- Not answered. Which sentence uses correct word order?
- Not answered. Select every opener that appropriately hedges an opinion in a review comment.
- Not answered. Which words tend to make "___ use a map here" sound dismissive?
- Not answered. Choose the verb that softens the suggestion: "It ___ be cleaner to inline this check."
- Not answered. Why do experienced reviewers often write "Could we rename this?" instead of "Could you rename this?"
- Not answered. Which phrasing keeps the comment about the code rather than the person?
- Not answered. You reply "Good catch!" to a review comment. What are you saying?
- Not answered. The author replies "Addressed in
e4f2a91." What does that mean? - Not answered. A review comment confuses you. Which reply asks for clarification most effectively?
- Not answered. Choose the natural completion: "Good point — ___ extract this into a helper."
- Not answered. Fill in the blank: "I haven't addressed the naming comments ___ — I'll push tonight." Type the missing word.
- Not answered. A reviewer asks for a change you believe is wrong. Which response handles the disagreement best?
- Not answered. Which sentence is correct?
- Not answered. Fill in the blank: "The parser caches ___ result between runs." Type the missing word.
- Not answered. Choose the correct word: "Validating at import time is cheaper ___ validating on every render."
- Not answered. Choose the correct word: "If we cast to
any, we ___ all the type information." - Not answered. Choose the correct word: "All checks pass ___ stylelint."
- Not answered. Choose the correct word: "I'd ___ against renaming the public API in a patch release."
- Not answered. Choose the correct word: "This helper violates the ___ of least privilege."
- Not answered. Choose the correct word: "The new lint rule ___ the formatter — they catch different problems."