１１月２５日投稿の添削結果を受け取りました。正しい英文を書くのは難しいことを実感しますがその内添削箇所ゼロとなるように努力したいと思います。

I teach at our local technical college.  One spring day I was taking the roll in my secretarial class.  Cindy was absent.  Because she was known as a sun worshiper, I suspected she was skipping class and enjoying the sun.  Nevertheless, I asked, “Cindy won’t be here this afternoon?”

“She went home to lay in the sun,” a young woman in the front row volunteered  frankly.  She got “lie” mixed up with “lay”.  “This woman is going to be working as a secretary and yet she made such a mistake.  Her grammar should be corrected now, otherwise she’ll be embarrassed at the office someday”, I thought, and whispered, “Lie”.  I intended to tell her, “Not lay, but lie,” audible only to her to avoid embarrassing her before the class.

But, my consideration for her didn’t work as I intended.

“Okay,” she replied in astonishment. “Cindy got sick and went home.”

In the first place, she didn’t realize that she had made a grammatical error.  In the second place, she thought I was telling her to protect Cindy’s honor by lying to the class as to why Cindy was absent.  So she made up a lie in a hurry, and told it to the class.