The PhD students looked at ways of incorporating rhetorical styles into their poster presentations. They were best at using the rule of three for repetition, but clearly need lots of practice in creating shorter, more powerful parallel phrases.
I demonstratrated the power of cutting out needless repetition through this correction (which is still not ideal):
To apply [...]
I’ve been listening to Al Jazeera all day as the reports come in about the horrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, 8.9 on the Richter scale, a 7 on the Japanese scale. The Japanese people are being so courageous. Thinking of them.
Anyway, as I listen, it strikes me: There’s been a lot [...]
I’m just roughing out something on how students and professors/ lecturers at college talk to each other, and am using the VOICE and MICASE online academic corpora for guidance. Dialogues will hardly contain the names of the two partners. You won’t necesessarily need to use the name of the person when you first address them. [...]
You’re going camping and want to borrow a friend’s tent over the weekend. So you say: “Could I have it ______ Friday afternoon? We’re leaving on Friday after work.”
Until or by?
Until means from now until then.
By, used for deadlines, means not later than then.
By… at the latest!
Imagine: If you said “until Friday”, your friend [...]
In a week we’ll be burying my mother’s ashes on Drummond. We’ve decided to read some of her poems, with a translation into English. She published a volume of them in the Wilhelm Andermann Verlag in Vienna in 1944 when she was 21; a miracle, since paper was so rare towards the end of the [...]
My favorite quote so far at IATEFL: “Do not teach things that are wrong.” That’s Dave Willis. And as he proves in this talk held before a room full of English teachers, it’s easier said than done. We often enough do teach total malarkey, namely as soon as we teach prescriptive grammar rules that don’t [...]
This editing game is more ‘focussed practice’ than ‘game’:
Copy the paragraph into “Comments” and change one word. A word may need to be replaced by two words (or several words may have to change together). Make every version meaningful. If someone ahead of you has made a change that you think requires [...]
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