Pronunciation: Consonants and vowels

HOW TO PRONOUNCIATE CONSONANTS

Consonant Sounds are produced by completely or partially stopping the breath. Consonant Sounds can be voiceless (VL, no vibration of the vocal cords) or voiced (VD, vibration of the vocal cords) and often come in sound pairs.

The symbols used for consonants are shown in the following table. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the left is voiceless, the one to the right voiced. 

Writing: Essay

Essay Structure

Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. As it is a text about an idea, the essay must be a clear well-structured text and make clear for the reader what are the important points of it.

The focus of such an essay predicts its structure. It dictates the information readers need to know and the order in which they need to receive it. Despite of the existence of guidelines to construct certain kind of essays, there is not a set formula to suit all of them.

Answering Questions:  The Parts of an Essay

A typical essay contains many different kinds of information, often located in specialized parts or sections. Introductions and conclusions have fixed places, but other parts don't. Counterargument, for example, may appear within a paragraph, as part of the beginning, or before the ending. Background material (historical context or biographical information, the definition of a key term) often appears at the beginning of the essay, between the introduction and the first analytical section, but might also appear near the beginning of the specific section to which it's relevant.

To help yourself out you can ask to your essay these three following questions, if it can answer them, then your essay is correct, if not it could be seen as a simply observation of a fact.

"What?" 

To answer this question you should give an evidence demostrating that your argument is true. Normally you should put this directly after the introduction. As you are writing about your observations, in this part is where you should write more, but be aware that this part should not occupy more than a third of your finished essay or it will lack balance.

Listening Comprehension: Muhammad Ali's speech

Grammar: Passive Structures

Passive Structures

FUNCTIONS OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

The passive voice is used to show interest in the person or object that experiences an action rather than the person or object that performs the action. In other words, the most important thing or person becomes the subject of the sentence.

EXAMPLES

• The passive voice is used frequently. (= we are interested in the passive voice, not in who uses it.)
• The house was built in 1654. (= we are interested in the house, not in who built it.)
• The road is being repaired. (= we are interested in the road, not in the people who are doing the repairs.)

Sometimes we use the passive voice because we don't know or do not want to express who performed the action.

EXAMPLES

• I noticed that a window had been left open.
• Every year thousands of people are killed on our roads.
• All the cookies have been eaten.
• My car has been stolen!

The passive voice is often used in formal texts. Switching to the active voice will make your writing clearer and easier to read.

Writing: Newspaper Article

Newspaper Articles: Learn How To Nail Them!

There is nothing better than doing something knowing how to rock it, that's why you are going to learn how to become the ultimate journalist, having in mind not only the content but also the way you do it, as you would not take serious any article which has been written in comic sans, for example.

Let's start from the very beginning: decide what to write about! First of all, you must know what topic would you be talking about and, when you have chosen it, you must become an expert, in that way, you will be able explain and tell something you have to understand everything about it.

Once you have decided what to write about, try to write it down as clear as possible, your reader will appreciate it. Write at the beginning a little summary to introduce the rest. Then, tell the main idea and develop it further. Finally, close it up with the main idea of your paper.

Up till now, you have done most of the work, but the content is not everything, the shape is of great importance as reaching your audience is firstly done with an eye-catching appearance, and to do so, you need a catchy title and the right format. The title must be bold,  at least twice bigger than the size of the content of the article, and, something many people do not realize, every first letter of every word has to be Capital. Remember that you can also have a subheading which size will be a bit bigger than the article but smaller than the one of the title, nonetheless, also in bold.