Greetings and General Information

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. Use the Comments facility at the end of every page and start making friends worldwide.

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Well, without further ado, let's start our other lessons today.

Month 13 - Lesson 52

We started studying three subjects back in September 2014: pronunciation and grammar for improving your communication skills, as well as website design and development, for those advanced students of ours who would like to apply their English to building a business online.

Once we covered the basics of pronunciation, we started a new course in reading, which we finished in March 2015. Following some requests at that time, we started a section on educational games, to add the fun into your learning. I do hope you like these.

Announcement

That course was for our advanced users of English – more, for those who actually are prepared to apply their knowledge of English in real life, by building a business online. This present course will appeal to everybody, from beginners to advanced speakers of English, more precisely to those of you who want to master the skill of writing in English.

Until I'll have the time to write my e-books from these courses, you can enjoy our past lessons for free, as follows:

Grammar ~ Comparison of Adverbs

You can find our lesson on Comparison of Adverbs here. I hope you find it conclusive and, as always, useful to the brim.

Writing Skills ~ Introduction

Dismissing the third example, we shall consider first of all the basic abilities of writing in English – the general craft one needs, before going on to the more specific craft one needs in order to use writing within the large spectrum of this art, whether it is writing poetry, prose, journalism, writing for television or radio and one can carry on enumerating. But that comes later – much later. Let’s start with the beginning.

Similar to our use of grammar (according to what it is that you wish to express, you may select certain words and you would use them in a certain way, not otherwise), we shall firstly consider the use of words in building our messages – from sentences to paragraphs, for us to learn what actually goes into the skill of writing.

Let us take the message of Sir Ernest Gowers, who wrote in his book “Plain Words”, first published in 1948 and which became the reference book “The Complete Plain Words” – a necessary companion for anybody who wants to learn how to say what needs to be said. At the end of his prologue in this book, he urged the reader to pause and think about writing:

“Let us therefore agree, before we go any further, that a reasonably good standard of writing is a mark not of preciosity but of good sense, not of prissiness but of efficiency; that such a standard can be attained by anyone with a little effort; that the effort will be worthwhile…; that it requires neither hairsplitting nor self-consciousness but merely a willingness to acquire good habits; and, finally, that a writer with good habits may be allowed to make an occasional slip, just as a good doctor or lawyer may occasionally give the wrong advice or a good cashier the wrong change, without incurring eternal damnation.”

This, put simply, wants to say that:
- Good writing is a sign of efficiency in using the words;
- Everybody who wants to do it, can;
- The effort it requires is simply about building good habits;
- That even with good habits, mistakes are sometimes acceptable.

If I leave you contemplate on this until next time and give you an exercise to do in the meanwhile, I would like to hear from you by then, please send your answer to the exercise at the end of this page: Writing Skills

Game of the Week ~ 'Make' or 'Do'

Let's dig into the Make or Do game!

If you don't, think of it this way: you use 'make' mostly in the case of making, or building something with your hands or by machine. You use 'do' mostly in cases when you do something more abstract, like doing homework or the housework.

This is it for now, my friends!

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 .

Autumn dawns upon us again, school begins and hopefully you're ready for a new year of hard work. I wish you reach top achievements in all your endeavours once again. Share some with us when you have a minute.

All the best from me until next time,

Lucia da Vinci

Founder of My English Club