When you become a whistleblower
Yesterday Edward Snowden came forward and outed himself as the whistleblower who leaked information about Boundless Informant. This system developed by the NSA with major corporations, enables raw data to be analyzed and processed in the cloud, including IP addresses, so sender and recipient information can be tracked to rough location. I’m not going to […]
Keep calm and carry on
Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939, intended to raise the morale of the British public in the event of a German invasion. It was never used, even during the air raids, but kept for the worst case. What could be more British! The poster was […]
Teaching the present perfect
A longstanding client of mine recently wanted to pick up lessons again with the aim of refreshing his grammar skills, to increase his confidence in using the language which he is already quite proficient in and uses on a daily basis. While I generally am more of a business and communication skills trainer, teaching the […]
“What are you selling?” “Personality”
Comedian Salesman Kenny Brooks: “I’ve got a disease called enthusiasm”. Catching! Goes into suburbia with his cleaning liquid, deals with bad attitudes, and lays his word wit on his potential customers, playing to their social anxieties (“Don’t laugh too hard cause the neighbors gonna see this black kid scrubbing your windows”). My favorite one-liners: My […]
Symphony of Science
This wonderful video is not just a joy to ponder… It also shows perfectly, by engineering natural speech into song, how rhythmic English is, and how speakers of English in the UK, US and Down Under will stress the content words and separate what they say into phrases. This is something that my students from […]
Online tools and resources for scientific writing
I’m still struggling to teach scientific writing to a diverse group of PhD candidates that I only see occasionally. My latest attempt is to give them a set of online tools to analyze their genre of target texts (published works and their own work in progress), and to tell me how they like what the […]
iCloud: iUnderstand
This is one of Steve Job’s last presentations, still explaining “his” products with inspired simplicity and clarity. Focus with me for a moment on his metalanguage (often called signposting), that is the language he uses to take us from one point to the next. Metalanguage or signposting varies widely between presentation types, and is generally […]
