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.

You and your friends can always 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, with thanks. Also, they can read the previous issues on Back Issues for English Corner E-zine. Of course, you can also unsubscribe at any point, by using the link at the end of any issue of the e-zine, should you wish.

In addition, we had the 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.

As we finally finished the course in website design in the last week of August, we have replaced it with our new course in writing, which I hope will appeal to everybody, from beginners to advanced speakers of English, more precisely to those 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 Clauses and Phrases

Writing ~ What Can Be Learned from Teachers?

My advice is to never give up learning new vocabulary and, once you started to write regularly, to never give up the habit either, as this is an art which develops continuously and the language used is going to be forever in process – you will never reach the end of that learning process, no matter how long your life is meant to be. Whether you’re writing in your own language or in English, or another foreign language – all and any of them are living entities; they develop and change along the years, leaving us no alternative than just to keep up by learning more. You only need to watch the Word Trend Watch on a good dictionary site, like Merriam Webster, to mention the least.

Having said all this, for every writer there must come a time when the general learning is no longer sufficient, when (s)he feels the need to look for guidance beyond the books and dictionaries. At this point the only reliable guide is someone who has travelled the same path further than the learner him/herself, in other words, a practitioner of the art, someone who has made the pursuit of writing his life or her life.

But how and where can one find such a teacher? In England it has been made easier during the last half a century, since the opening of the Arvon Foundation, which organises residential courses for the general public where more than 350 writers are lecturing regularly and can be consulted by the learners online.

In other words, through this medium hundreds of inexperienced writers have the opportunity to work in conducive circumstances with professional writers, specialists in many of the craft’s various disciplines (from poetry, to writing for radio, TV scripts and writing for children, non-fiction or whatever other genre one is interested in).

Our course in writing skills (the one presented in these weekly e-zines) will be designed following the Arvon Foundation’s principles, because the form of training that this enterprise provides is essential to every student of writing and it can be applied to any student of any age and educational background.

Apart from this, we shall also consider the principles taught in formal schools and universities, leading to the successfully passing tests and exams in writing, of which suffice to mention TOEFL, IELTS, CAP and CAE as a minimum.

We shall continue next time by looking at the minimum requirements necessary for starting to write, before we’ll take a more practical approach to developing your writing skills.

Game of the Week ~ Scrabble

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 .

All the best from me until next time,

Lucia da Vinci

Founder of My English Club