[Postal] 8, Clerical Accuracy: Mc Does Not File With Mac

Lesson eight of the free Quibank postal exam course. Clerical Accuracy again, and this time the opponent is your own eye. Every filing item on this test is built so that the names you would naturally group together are not the names that belong together, and the rule that separates them is mechanical. Here is the idea the whole lesson rests on.

Before you compare two names, you convert each one into an indexing unit. Spaces, apostrophes and capital letters drop out, and what is left is one plain run of letters. You compare those runs from the left. You file what is written, never what it sounds like.

So the procedure is three moves. First, close up the spaces and drop the punctuation inside a surname, so a two-word name becomes one unbroken run. Second, compare the runs from the left, one letter at a time. Third, stop at the first letter that differs, because that letter decides and nothing after it matters.

Item one. A list is already in filing order: MacAllen, Macklin, Madsen, Nolan. Where does McAllen belong? The tempting answer is right beside MacAllen, because the two sound identical.

The rule does not do that. MacAllen, Macklin and Madsen all keep an A in second place, and McAllen has a C there. The letter A comes before the letter C, so McAllen files after all three. And M comes before N, so it stops short of Nolan.

The answer is between Madsen and Nolan. That is worth stating as a rule of its own. Mac and Mc are filed exactly as spelled, letter by letter. They are not grouped together as though Mc were a short way of writing Mac.

The standard treats the other prefixes the same way, including Van, De, and the O apostrophe names. Item two. Put these four surnames in filing order: Vance, Vanderberg, Van Buren, Van Ness. The instinct is to gather the two-word names first.

That is the classic error. Close the space up inside each Van name. All four then agree through the first three letters, so the fourth decides, and those letters are B, C, D and N. The order is Van Buren, Vance, Vanderberg, Van Ness, with two one-word names sitting between the pair you wanted to keep together.

Item three moves inside the name. Four entries share the surname Ortiz: Ortiz Maria, Ortiz Maria C, Ortiz Mario T, and Ortiz Marco A. Which is filed first? When the surname unit is identical, the given name decides.

Marco, Maria and Mario agree through the first three letters. At the fourth letter you have a C, an I, and an O, and C comes first. So Ortiz Marco A is filed first. Two habits cost people points here.

The first is filing by recognition. You see a familiar name, your eye takes in the whole word at once, and you never reach the letter that decides. The second is trusting sound. Names that rhyme, or that look like a family, are exactly the pairs the exam separates.

Recap. Convert each name into one unbroken run of letters, dropping spaces, apostrophes and capitals. Compare from the left and stop at the first difference. Mac and Mc file exactly as spelled, so they do not sit together.

A prefix joins the part that follows it into one unit, which lets other names sort between two names that open the same way. When surnames match, the given name decides. Drill the Clerical Accuracy pool free at quibank.com/en/postal-exam. In English, Chinese or Spanish, with no sign-up.

These items are pure technique, and technique is the part of this test you can make automatic before you sit down.