I’ve started a book project, which forces me to conceptualize something from the big picture down to the last detail. After poking around for about a month exploring the areas I have found important in my business English classes over the past years, thinking through individual features and refreshing my contact to clients who might [...]
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 [...]
One of the most important elements of good writing is clarity. Unfortunately, English has a lot of potential for ambiguity, which makes it easy to write ambiguous sentences. Great for humor, of course, but not a lot of help when it comes to writing works of science! One example is the use of [...]
Parallelism adds elegance to your writing:
Clumsy: They work with great care and effectively.
Elegant: They work carefully and effectively.
Clumsy: Making contacts is as important as to give a good presentation.
Elegant: Making contacts is as important as giving a good presentation.
Clumsy: We analyzed the extensive data, which was highly complex.
Elegant: We analyzed the extensive, highly complex data.
Clumsy: [...]
A business English student of mine is getting into writing on his Ning and blog (yeah!), and I sent him these exercises to get him started.
Freewriting
This is an exercise in overcoming writers block and allows you to brainstorm. It’s also a great way to avoid translating or focussing too narrowly on issues of what makes [...]
Today I’m very honored to be a visiting blogger on Chris Adam’s Bits ‘n Bob’s Show ‘n Tell, as part of his Mirror Posts/ Through the Looking Glass series. A post in his great San Francisco blog about a very surrealistic art show, “Altered Barbie”, leading to an equally surrealistic day, set my imagination off. [...]
Writing can be a lonely and frustrating business. Writing for online learners of English as I do is particularly tricky: I don’t get much feedback from my readers. As my employers are very busy, asking them to review and edit my work is not always possible. But that means that any errors I make and [...]
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