Experience

16+ years teaching Taiwanese | FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Bernard English

Bernard English
FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Online English Tutor/Teacher

My photo
Native Speaker of American English Conversation practice. Chatting or in-depth discussion of news articles. TOEFL-IELTS practice / CV, SOP, journal paper, essay revision 英語家教 彈性排課, 免通勤, 托福, 職場英文, 履歷/論文修改…等。 請看我的學生推薦信。

Search This Blog

email: bernard.english@gmail.com

website: https://sites.google.com/site/taipeibm/
FREE 30-minute trial classes available!

Showing posts with label 2. Writing Tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2. Writing Tips. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

George Will: China's precarious future SOURCE: triblive.com

Speaking of China:

 “No country,” says Eberstadt, “has ever gone gray at a faster pace.”

1875709_web1_gtr-cmns-Will-103119

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Hi? Dear? The State Of The E-Mail Salutation by Susan Adams FROM Forbes

"I would stick with 'Dear' as a way to open an initial piece of business correspondence or any e-mail you are sending that has to do with the first contact in a job search, unless you have good reason to think that the person you’re contacting prefers a less formal form of address."

Monday, August 17, 2009

Game: Transitional words and phrases FROM Study Guides and Strategies

OK, no one is going to get addicted to this game. But anything to help you better understand transitional words and phrases is worth a look.

Monday, November 3, 2008

TOEFL Essay

The uncorrected TOEFL essay below is by one of my students, Luisito. It is one of the better TOEFL essays I have read so far during this TOEFL season. Although there are other minor mistakes, I would just like to point out some more serious problems with the third paragraph. Click on the third paragraph to see my comments.

A company has announced that it wishes to build a large factory near your community. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this new influence on your community. Do you support or oppose the factory? Explain your position


If a large company is going to build a factory in my hometown, it will surely brings about positive as well as negative impacts on my hometown. While some people may oppose the idea of building a factory in their hometown, I still would like the company to open a new factory even though the factory may lead to some disadvantages.

First of all, I think the factory will absolutely contributes to the growth of the economy in my hometown. The factory can create many positions for local residents, thus alleviating the unemployment in my hometown. On top of that, the new factory may also lead to an influx of people who look for positions in the factory. In this way, the demand for housing will be raised, and local residents can make profits by renting their house to these people. Besides, as more and more people come into my hometown, other business activities will also be more prosperous. For instance, a giant shopping mall may be opened to live up to the demand of consumption.

It is an undeniable fact that the factory may lead to many problem such as environmental pollution. Besides, the crime rate may also become higher due to the increased population in the area. However, I think these problems can be easily tackled with as long as the company and the local government cooperates. For instance, the authorities concerned should come up with a regulation to prevent the excessive air pollution emitted by the factory. The company should also invest a huge amount of money to reduce its pollution. Besides, the government can hire more police officers to lower the crime rate. This approach may also create more job vacancies simultaneously.

To put it in a nutshell, I would like the company to open a new factory in my hometown. Even though the factory may cause environmental and social problems for my hometown, the economic benefits can outweigh these negative impacts. Besides, I also think it is possible to solve the problems mentioned above with the efforts paid by the company and the local government. As a result, I hold positive views towards the effects resulted from this new factory.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Sample Business Letters FROM 4HB.com

By their nature many of these letters need to be formal. Some of them seem needlessly complicated though. Hopefully they can sill give readers some ideas of what to write.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Nominalization by Michael Harvey FROM The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

Nominalizations are a major part of what's wrong with lots of student writing. A nominalization is an action expressed as a noun. Any nominalization can be turned into a verb, and vice versa (sometimes the two forms, the noun and the verb, are identical)
[Check his site for a list of nominalizations.]

Nominalization ...........................................................................Revision

An analysis was performed.Dr. Radic performed an analysis.
A distortion occurred in the presentation of the candidate's position.Your newspaper distorted the candidate's position.
There were reports of attacks on women in Central Park.A roving band of men in Central Park attacked any women who crossed their path.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Napoleon's Idiot

Though perhaps apocryphal, this story illustrates the importance of clear writing, as well as speaking.
. . . [Napoleon] kept a severely retarded man, an "idiot", on his staff to review all commands issued from his headquarters before they were sent. If, and only if, "Napoleon's Idiot" understood them and could explain them, would the orders then be sent to his brilliant field commanders. This avoided many serious errors on the battlefield.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Words to organize your thoughts

FROM District Congress Committee Jaisalmer

This Indian website has compiled a list of words under each of the categories below. By familiarizing yourself with these categories and the words associated with each, you will be able to more easily organize your sentences and paragraphs and connect your thoughts more logically.

To give only one example, under TO SHOW REFERENCE are listed:

The following, The former, The latter

HERE ARE THE OTHER CATEGORIES:

To add an idea to one already stated

To limit or contradict something already said

To show a time or place arrangement of your ideas

To exemplify some idea or to sum up what you have said

To show cause and effect

To show reference

To show movement from the general to the specific

To compare

JOIN INDEPENDENT CLAUSES
Coordinating Conjunctives
Conjunctive Adverbs

INTRODUCE DEPENDENT CLAUSES
Subordinating Conjunctions
Relative Pronouns

Correlative conjunctions

Parenthetical expressions

Indefinite pronouns

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Footnotes

The context of this paragraph is a criticism of "new" ways of writing history.
The liberation from the tyranny of the discipline takes many forms. At the simplest level, it is a liberation from footnotes (or endnotes, as is now commonly the case). Not only is there no longer any consensus about the form of notes; there is no longer any presumption in favor of notes in any form, so that many scholarly books are being published, even by university presses, without any notes at all. One historian, having written a controversial (and unfootnoted) book on the Holocaust, explained to an interviewer that footnotes are a "fetish [that] very often interferes with careful intellection and rumination." Another historian, presenting a revisionist view of American Cold War policies, claims that footnotes and bibliographies are "poor jokes" for a book like his, because the source of any quotation is meaningless except in relation to all the other documents and to the author's "process of reflection." If the reader, he argues, trusts the author because the source of the quotation is cited, there is no reason to distrust him because it is not.
What!? I would go ahead and be meticulous about including footnotes. Incidentally, Gertrude Himmelfarb cites all her sources, I just didn' include them. You can get the details in her book, The New History and the Old (pp. 21-22), from which the above quote was taken.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

MS Word and Writing

Here's one tip regarding MS Word
FROM Guide to Grammar and Style by Jack Lynch

MS Word, in its many versions, is now the most common word processor on both the PC and the Macintosh. It's so widespread, and so meddlesome, that it deserves a special note. The "AutoCorrect" feature, in particular, is a damned nuisance. It was designed by and for people who like high-tech toys, not by and for people who write.

  • Word wants to make the letters that accompany ordinal numbers — the st in first, the nd in second, the rd in third, and the th in other numbers — superscripts: not 11th, but 11th. Humbug. Look around: you'll notice that no professionally printed books use superscripts, and neither should you. Besides, most house styles say most ordinal numbers should be spelled out: eleventh.

Solutions? For starters, turn off the superscript ordinals; there's no reason for them in the world. (It's under "Tools," at least in the current versions of Word.)

Followers