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Issue #037 -- Week 18/01/15-24/01/15 January 27, 2015 |
Hello,Greetings and General InformationA warm welcome to our new subscribers! I wish you will find My English Club fun and instructive and I look forward to welcome you as a new valued member soon. Read, learn and communicate around the world! Please feel free to contribute to these pages when you have a minute. They are meant to be a platform for exchanging ideas, stories and opinions - an ideal medium for practicing your English, which should be used to the full. Together, let's bring it alive, let's make it the welcoming community you wished for, when you joined. A new and valuable addition to the website is the comments feature that can facilitate your communication 24/7 from now on. Your messages will be monitored and accepted or denied, depending on the content and the attitude, but NOT on the grammar, spelling and overall correctness of your input. I have offered the service of correcting messages retrospectively, as a constructive contribution to your continuous improvement. Do participate and make this place feel like a community. You and your friends can subscribe individually through the form on My English Club. If anybody mentions to you that they are interested in receiving it, please tell them this - many thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Month 5 ~ Lesson 21We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for applying your English in practice once you get skilful in English and website building. Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading. You can find our past lessons as follows: Pronunciation: Reading ~ Reading Skills for TOEFL [4]Insert Sentences into the Passage I some reading exercises during a TOEFL exam you will be asked to determine where to insert a sentence into your reading passage. Inside the passage you will have a number of insertion points outlined by codes, like 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D; 2A, 2B, etc. You will have to select the most appropriate insertion point for the sentence given to you in the question. You will decide according to the context and there is only one most appropriate place for that sentence. Let’s consider the example below: The Origin of Chess The origins of the game of chess are not known with certainty, and traditional stories in a number of cultures claim credit for developing the game. [1A] One legend claims that chess was invented during the Trojan Wars. [1B] According to another legend, chess was developed to depict the battle between two royal brothers for the crown of Persia. [1C] In a third legend, chess was the creation of the mythical Arab philosopher Sassa. [1D] Whatever its origins, chess was known to exist in India as early as 500 B.B., and it eventually spread from India to Persia, where it took on much of the terminology that today is part of the game. [2A] Foot soldiers in the Persian army were called plyadah, which became the pawns in today’s game, and the Persian chariot was a rukh, which became the rook. [2B] The Persian king was the shah, which evolved into the name chess. [2C] Shahmat, which means “the king is dead”, became the expression “checkmate”. [2D] Question 1: Look at the four squares […] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage. “When one brother was killed, the remaining brother had the game invented to explain the tragic events to his mother.” Where would the sentence best fit? Choose one of the squares to add the sentence to the passage. Here you should study the sentence to be inserted and then look at the context before and after each insertion box. Because the sentence mentions one brother and the remaining brother, and the context before insertion point [1C] mentions two royal brothers, you can deduct that the sentence should be added at this insertion point [1C]. Question 2: Look at the four squares […] that indicate where the following sentence could be added to the passage. “This expression is used during the game to indicate that one player’s king is on the verge of being captured.” Where would the sentence best fit? Choose one of the squares to add the sentence to the passage. Equally, you should study the sentence to be inserted and then look at the context before and after each insertion box. Because the sentence mentions this expression about the king, and the context before insertion point [2D] mentions the king and the expression “checkmate”, you can deduct that the sentence should be added at this insertion point [2D]. As an extra note here, it comes as a coincidence that I learned about these expressions now, when we are mourning the recent loss of King Abdullah of KSA. Grammar ~ Pieces of InformationOK, so last time I said we shall start looking into the pieces of information that go into the message you want to put across, whether in writing or by speaking. These pieces of information can be defined as the pieces of language which are separated from what goes before and from what follows and which do not contain any punctuation marks. In written English, we use the punctuation marks to make this separation, but not to split the unit/piece of information. In spoken English, a piece of information can be defined as a tone unit or a unit of intonation containing a nucleus. A nucleus is the focal point of an intonation pattern, like the word that is stressed in a sentence. We may describe a nucleus as a strongly stressed syllable which marks a major change of pitch direction, either up or down, which is indicated by an arrow. Take for example, the sentence: “She is going to the States.” Have a look at
the change of pitch indicated by the arrow.
In this example, the nucleus marks a fall in pitch towards the end of the sentence, which we can simply indicate by underlining and without indicating the other stressed syllables. “She is going to the States. ” We also indicate the boundaries of a tone unit by using the symbol ¦: ¦“She is going to the States. ”¦ Now, notice the difference between these sentences: “My friend has a cat and two rabbits.” [1] They practically mean the same, but [1] presents the message as ONE piece of information, whereas [2] presents it as TWO pieces of information, separated by a punctuation mark (;). In speech, the same contrast can be seen in: I suggest you should practice determining the tone units in the books and articles you read, before we step further next time, to work on dividing a message into tone units. This type of exercise will be very useful in speech - it will help you to work your intonation around these tone units, so that the listener will understand the meaning of your message better. Website Design ~ The Most Wanted Response (MWR)Now, before we go any further, to look into more details about a few monetization avenues, I want to talk to you about another crucial stage before implementing any monetization strategy. This is a thinking and planning stage, but a very important one, indeed. I am currently in this phase with my monetization, and I am grateful to have taken this opportunity to review this lesson, as it helps me crystalize in my mind how best to implement a few potential alternative. Before I start, let me remind you of the number of possibilities one has, to make a website support a family. That was in Issue 034 , if you remember, when I listed the following: Among the most popular sources of income are: AdSense ads, AdSense search, affiliate marketing, referrals, lead generation/finder’s fees, multi-level marketing, hard goods (one’s own or else dropshipping), e-goods (e-books, audio, video), Cafepress, DVD sales, service selling (i.e. offering various services to other individuals or companies), local business, webmaster services, e-bay/net auction, membership, donations, rental agency, joint venture, sell ad space, and why not? PREsell SBI! Your Most Wanted Response (MWR) Before you start implementing any of the above, you must have it very clearly in mind what your “Most Wanted Response” (MWR) is. Your MWR is the action you want your visitors to take on a specific page. This usually is to get the click. The question is, what does “the click” mean? What the page is about … what it is for … determines what “the click” will mean. It could be to get a form completed, to get the visitor to click on an affiliate link, to buy your own product, or just to travel to other pages on your site. But it all starts with “the click!” Without a clear MWR, your visitors are much less likely to take the primary action you want. In fact, they will likely take only one of two actions: 1. They will leave your site (worst case scenario and the one they reach eventually); or Types of page Primary MWR For example this is what you may want your visitors to do on certain pages on your website: On My English Club, I’ve reached as far as building the E-zine signup form, which is posted on all the pages through an automatic ‘sitewide dot’ and the links from the Home Page to the tier 2 pages and then to the tier 3 pages, but that’s about it. Maybe my approach would have been different (a more aggressive, sales oriented one), should I have skipped living in China for 2 years, with plans to return. How? I learned during that time how deep-rooted and widespread suspicion is, in the mind of the Chinese, when it comes to the small business and the start-up entrepreneur, which is what I was then, and I still am. I would have had opportunities to ‘team-up’ with a powerful backer in the city of Suzhou, on the outskirts of Shanghai… however, I opted out of a possible deal when I realised how tied-down I would become, by the invisible fist of the bureaucratic and corruptible (if not already corrupted) future associate/partner. The thing is, I am just as suspicious when it comes to corruption and I will NOT be part of it in my lifetime! But that’s another story, for another place on this website, or for my book. Other plans for this website, at a later stage, are to sell: Now, back to our subject: Deciding on an MWR for a page is easy. The real work comes in taking that MWR and making it happen... getting visitors to do what you want, when you want them to do it. This is the most difficult stage, and it needs careful attention and a complete lesson. If I start on this angle tonight, I can guarantee that neither you nor I shall sleep tonight… Therefore, I suggest I shall do it for those of you who express an interest in this topic. Eventually, I shall write an e-book from all these materials. However, if there is anybody out there who would like to continue learning about this now, please let me know, by emailing back and I shall share extra materials with you without delays. For now, suffice to understand the importance of this stage in designing a website and that there are certain strategies you can use, to implement various monetization strategies. Next time, we shall look at some PayPal options we can use on a website, as a payment and credit card processor. Let's face it: if one wants to sell, one wants to collect the payment, too. This Is It, Folks!I hope you find this information useful and not too confusing. Even though you're in the stage of building on it, have patience at this point in your learning and you'll be able to reap the fruit of your work later on, whichever aspect of our lessons you are concentrating on. Please feel free to comment and suggest your ideas by replying to this email - I look forward to hearing from you. If you wish to chat either with me or with other members worldwide, go to My English Club ! OK, I wish you all a great week ahead. Have fun, as always! My best wishes, Lucia da Vinci Founder of My English Club |
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