Thank you

Thank you for help with Cornelsen Basis for Business C1: Helmut Burger for being my first sounding board Janan Barksdale for being so patient and thorough and making something that seemed impossible work Carole Eilertson and the advisors Mindy Ehrhart Krull, Andreas Grundtvig, Gabi Hirthe, Marion Karg, Karen Richardson and Miriam Zeh-Glöckler for being constructive, […]

Zara’s logistics

I’m writing a book for business English, Basis for Business C1. When I was putting the unit on logistics together, I was initially thinking of using Inditex, Zara’s parent company, as the main example. But it’s already been used in several other course book, including Cornelsen’s Career Express, and I’m trying to be as original […]

English for Artists: Virgina Peck’s Buddha paintings

I would love to write a course for English for Artists and Art Historians. Art was my first love, before I decided to go into history and then later into language teaching, and I still go to art galleries every chance I can. To realize my dream, I’ll need to win some artists as clients […]

Writing

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 […]

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 […]

Practice academic writing skills 2: Ambiguity

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 prepositions. Compare: […]

Practice academic writing skills 1: Parallelism

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 […]