Tag: Higher Education
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Email Etiquette
Observing appropriate email etiquette is a perennial problem at the International Academy. Teach students to write effective emails with Grammarly’s post on best practices for writing effective emails: Every email has the same basic structure: Subject line, greeting, email body, and closing. But as with every written form of professional communication, there’s a right way…
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Hyper-Vigilant Attribution Culture Exacerbates Academese
… the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing…
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The APA Style Blog on Citing Instagram and Other Social Media Platforms
If you thought the nice people over at the American Psychological Association didn’t have anything to say about your social media habits, think again. Never let it be said a medium yet exists that American style guides can’t swarm with a flurry of rules that could dissuade a grizzly from a comb brimming with viscous,…
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Implications of The Bottleneck Hypothesis for Higher-Ed ESL
A recent article in the journal Second Language Research by Isabel Jensen … lends support for a theory of second language acquisition called The Bottleneck Hypothesis
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Steven Pinker’s 13 Tweets for Writing Well-Written Prose
Steven Pinker is a linguist and psychologist who teachers at Harvard University. He’s most famously known for his popular-science book on linguistics titled The Language Instinct among other books on cognitive science. In my classes, however, I most often use the style guide The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st…
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Engage Your Students’ Critical Thinking Faculties with the Trolley Problem
The trolley problem comes from the philosophical field of ethics, and it presents an excellent impetus for discussion in communication classes or topic for critical thinking in writing classes. Below are two short videos to get the lesson started. via An Animated Introduction to the Famous Thought Experiment, the “Trolley Problem,” Narrated by Harry Shearer…
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Poetry Applications for TESOL
I attended the presentation The Uses of Poetry in the ESL Classroom: Ways to Integrate Poetry in a Reading Class on March 15th by Janusz Solarz of Indiana University at the TESOL 2019 International Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Professor Solarz provided three capacities in which an educator might implement poetry in her English lessons. Introductions…
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Teaching Shudder Quotes
Shudder quotes, or weird quotes as the the author Chuck Wendig refers to them in the tweet at the end of this post, can be used to indicate your are using a word with ironic intent. Consider when you refer to the “stroke of genius” upper management foisted on everyone, and how all your colleagues…
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Slides that are Note-Taking App Friendly
The public speaking textbooks recommend presenters limit the number of slides to what’s necessary, and with the advent of smartphone scanner technology that’s more pertinent than ever. I just attended the TESOL 2019 International Conference and English Expo. Almost everyone was snapping photos and scanning the slides as they went by, myself included. What’s more,…
Ezra Vasquez 