Common Errors in English Usage

I saw a sign in a shop the other day over the pens and paper saying STATIONARY. I am guessing that the person who had put it there was thinking of STATIONERY, and didn’t actually want to tell me that the pens and paper couldn’t move! But it happens to all of us sometimes – we suddenly can’t remember how to spell a word, or we realise that there are two words that we mix up because we have never learnt the difference between them.

If you want to be able to look up all those things you get mixed up with then today’s link is for you. Common Errors in English Usage is a book and a website by Paul Brians of Washington State University. The content is really useful and the customised google search box makes finding your query easy. So, what are the things you get mixed up with? Wander/wonder? Affect/effect? Council/counsel?
Check out this treasure trove of English errors here.

Can I use ‘I’ in my essays?

I have been meeting new international students at university all week – how exciting to see you all! I was advertising our English Language Centre at a session for new students and I met a new American student who said that she couldn’t understand anything on the street in Plymouth! She said that when the lecturers spoke she had no problems, but the when she was out on the street she really found it difficult to understand what people were saying. And I thought, ‘If she has that much trouble, what must it be like for the others who don’t have English as a first language!’ Unfortunately I couldn’t offer her a place in one of our classes because she is a native English speaker, but I am sure she’ll tune in pretty quickly. But please remember guys, the key to tuning in is getting stuck in there and meeting home students. Overseas students are often shy and worried about their English. Sometimes students are so worried about making mistakes that they say nothing at all. Believe me, native speakers don’t care about any mistakes you make when you talk, as long as they can understand you. I understand that the British students’ ‘binge drinking’ habits can be hard to go along with, but not all students are like that. There are plenty of students who like doing other things and go to clubs and are quite keen to meet new people from around the world. Get down to your Student Union and get a list of student societies and join one you like the look of.

The other thing I wanted to mention was to do with the tone and style of academic writing. I marked a number of reports during our summer school in which students had used ‘I’ too often in their writing so that it made the writing too personal. Academic writing in English is impersonal. Here’s a useful link from Leeds University with some examples of phrases using ‘I’ in academic writing and how they have been rewritten to make them better.

Lectures with transcripts to improve your listening and everything else!

Here’s a joke which I have heard before, but which I heard again the other day, told by one foreign student to another one:

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?     Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?  Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?  British!

and it’s true that we British are very bad at learning to speak foreign languages. When we go abroad we tend to just speak louder at people and then get annoyed when they don’t understand our English! I read a very interesting article recently discussing the growth of English around the world and a lot of foreigners were quoted as saying that everyone in a multinational company could communicate quite happily with each other through English – but communication failed miserably with the British. That’s because all the non-native English speakers used standard  English and chatted quite comfortably together but then the British came along speaking their idiomatic English and nobody knew what they were talking about. So we British will have to learn to change our language after all!

I am always on the look out for lectures in English on interesting subjects with transcripts to go with them so that you can listen and read what they are saying when you don’t understand. I’ve come across another one of these, this time from ABC Radio National in Australia. This particular series of lectures is called the ‘Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures’. The fifth lecture is about cross-cultural differences, a concept which is closely linked to language learning. Enjoy this lectures series, and especially the final lecture here.

Real essays from real students with comments from real teachers!

I am so excited to bring you today’s resource which I am delighted to tell you comes from my own university! I know that one of the biggest problems that international students have in university is that they are not sure what their teachers expect of them. Students are given work to do, but they are not sure what a good essay or a good report looks like. Imagine if you could read essays and reports written by real students, and read the comments that their teachers had made! Well, you can with this resource The Writing for Assignments E-Library from the University of Plymouth. The aim of this resource is to teach students (all students, not just international students) how to write better by showing examples of good academic writing along with comments made by the academic who marked the work. You can search the bank by subject and level and type of assignment. The academic feedback on the writing is detailed and the project designers have categorised students’ writing into a variety of functions for purposes of analysis. This resource is by far the most impressive attempt to provide reviewed examples of academic writing I have ever seen.  The resource will be less useful for lower level students, but  for more advanced students who are already at university get used to visiting this extraordinary resource  here.