By Lucy @english-pro on
10/28/2009 8:07 PM
If you don’t have an iPhone it may be time to consider getting one – for the good of your language. Have a look at these little beauties you can access with a touch of a button/screen!
#1 Grammar 1 Grammar 1 will remind you - or teach you! -all of those parts of speech and areas of grammar that have you flumoxed.
#2 The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms A comprehensive text that gives students and any literary pundit helpful – even amusing- insights to almost 1,200 confusing literary terms. Let this little number break down those endless glossaries for you.
#3 Wurdle *Yawn, isn’t waiting around dull? Forget Snake or Tetris and stretch your mind instead: learn through play – it’s the only way! Identify as many words as possible by connecting letters on a word letter grid in a limited amount of time.
#4 The Hundred Best English Poems Compiled by Adam Gowans, this eBook contains the text of “The Hundred Best English Poems” published in 1904. According...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/28/2009 7:22 PM
Ingredients 250 g butter, softened 1 cup caster sugar 2 eggs 2 tablespoons vanilla essence 3 cups self-raising flour 2 cups hundreds and thousands
We also added some red food colouring to make them pink. Wowsers!
Method Preheat fan forced oven to 190°C. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until combined. Add flour and mix to form a dough. Put the hundreds and thousands into a bowl. Roll mixture into balls and flatten slightly. Drop one side of the biscuit into sprinkles and place on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 15 minutes or until slightly brown on the outside. Originally posted by http://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipe/Fairy-Biscuits-L4699.html
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/27/2009 5:28 PM
i wondered this morning what it would be like to write a post with no punctuation whatsoever and also see how easy id find it to do amazingly even in just this sentence ive already tried five times to add a capital or an apostrophe oops and there again i tried to stick in a fullstop how do you find it to read the post what goes through your mind as youre reading it do you feel there is a need for the punctuation or do you understand the whole post without those lovely little signposts wow this is like trying to stop a sneeze whenever i want to use correct punctuation i feel like i have an itch on the bottom of my foot and im wearing snowboard boots with my hands wrapped in gloves and there is absolutely no option of scratching well thats how it feels for me to write with no punctuation right now for example im gagging to start not only a new sentence but also a new paragraph but i know how utterly dreadful reading this must be having written it id be intrigued to see how you punctuate it and see whether the lack...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/24/2009 8:37 PM
I often wonder whether these mistakes are written for the general amusement of the reader by some kind of writing humour department. Alas, many of these gaffs wind the reader up or make the writer seem like an uneducated boob.
With so many of our communications these days depending on the written word, it makes some sense to ensure that what we write is accurate and clear.
Avoid these 11 mistakes and get the job, make the sale, and write better!
Constipated Clauses “It goes without saying that these exploits take a tremendous amount of skill.”
If it “goes without saying” then don’t say it. If it doesn’t, in fact, go without saying, then don’t say it does.
“Obviously, the sky is blue.” Putting the “obviously” doesn’t suddenly make the statement insightful.
Comma Vomit True or false: a comma must precede any use of the word “and”? FALSE. Commas should only precede and, but, for, or, nor, so, or yet when they introduce an independent clause. For example, “We laid...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/22/2009 10:10 PM
I posted my Emial moaning on a variety of LinkedIn groups and the reaction has been incredible. I am encouraged to know that I’m not the only one who feels so passionately about the apparent demise of our, curiously, dominating language. Doesn’t that seem like it’s all about-face?
English is undeniably the world’s most spoken language. (Cue David Brent moment!) FACT.
(…That includes as a foreign language incidentally – Mandarin still rules the roost with the most native speakers BUT (what do you mean I’m off on a tangent?!) which country has the highest number of English speakers? China! FACT.
Returning to my point. Isn’t it all a spot odd that while English dominates the business, popular culture and social media worlds, it seems to be deteriorating remarkably quickly.
As is its want, English borrows, evolves and expands, but it also seems to be bailing out...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/20/2009 8:24 PM
Rather sensibly one company examined 4,000 emails originating from their staff. In that number they found misspelled words in 486 of them and counted grammatical errors in 544 of them. That’s over a quarter of communication containing some kind of error.
That’s quite something, isn’t it? In these days when so much business is done using the written word, people are willing to send a document that they haven’t so much as spell checked (incredible when it’s just the click of an icon) or even re-read what they’ve composed.
Of course, human error is hardly something I can get all bent up about, but when I get an email that is barely legible because it lacks punctuation, grammar – or worse, doesn’t capitalise I – I get in quite a pickle. I, for one, could not part with my trust, money or time for someone who can’t even be bothered to hit the shift key once in a while.
How hard is it to...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/19/2009 12:36 PM
(title courtesy of Grandad Mawdsley, used whenever he didn’t like the direction of conversation, or simply couldn’t hear it!)
Apparently the BBC thinks most people will have only read 6 of the following 100 books . Let’s see how we all do.
How do you shape up?
Despite my degree and years of teaching English, I was a bit nervous when I read the statement above, but on reading the list I found I could breathe again. I was, and am!, pleasantly surprised by quite how many of these I’ve enjoyed over the years.
Which on the list would you rate most? Are there any that you really think shouldn’t be on there?
For my part, Swallows and Amazons caught my eye as it captured my imagination as a child; I read the whole series over a summer, wishing that I could be whisked away to play with the children in the books. Wonderful stories, but I suspect...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/18/2009 4:19 PM
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/18/2009 4:18 PM
It truly IS perfect. I found this one, again, years ago and haven’t found one to top it yet – and I have tried, believe me
Ingredients for the cake
350g carrots 70g raisins 230g wholewheat flour 2 teaspoons of cinnamon 1 teaspoon ground ginger ½ teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 236ml vegetable oil 170g soft brown sugar 4 eggs 2 tablespoons golden syrup Ingredients for the topping
7 oz cream cheese 2 oz softened unsalted butter 2 oz sifted icing sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla essence These quantities make a 9” round cake.
Start off by grating 12½ oz carrots and chopping 2 oz pecans. Put to one side. Sieve flour with 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, ½ teaspoon nutmeg and 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda. (Tip the bran bits left in the sieve into the mixture.) Whisk together 8 fl oz vegetable oil, 6 oz soft brown sugar, 4 eggs and 2 tablespoons’ golden syrup. (Heat the spoon first and the...
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By Lucy @english-pro on
10/18/2009 9:17 AM
I 'stumbled' across a fascinating article that, quite frankly, makes me feel pretty guilty by association.
The BBC's Today page discusses the tragedy of losing a language, stating that:
"In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist."
Astonishing.
"According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered. "The death in 2008 of Chief Marie Smith Jones signalled her language's death Among the ranks are the two known speakers of Lipan Apache alive in the US, four speakers of Totoro in Colombia and the single Bikya speaker in Cameroon."
The idea that there are already languages spoken by less than 10 people, that will die when those speakers move on, is galling.
Not only did the English (and Spanish)...
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