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Essay Help: 5 Tips for Writing Effective College Application Essays
Given the huge number of students that apply for admission overseas, your application essay can make all the difference between successfully securing admission and getting rejected. Most of the admission authorities focus on what you can offer to other students and how you can add value to their college. You can improve your chances of…
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50 Most Commonly Confused Words in English Language
It can be easy to mistake certain English words because they sound the same or quite similar and may also have similar spellings. However using the wrong word or using the word in the wrong sense reflects poorly on one’s language skills; so you should try and avoid this. We look at some of the…
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Grammar Rules that Are OK to Flout
English is more egalitarian and less hide bound than ever before. The rigidly strict and stuffily correct grammarian no longer holds sway the way they would have in earlier times. As English continues to evolve and more of the world’s population embraces it, its rules of grammar tend to become more accepting and less rigid.…
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The American Accent – Pointers for Pronunciation
Accents can be fascinating and can in many cases be desirable to acquire. The political, economic, social and cultural clout of North American countries; particularly the United States of America makes the American accent one of the most desirable in the world. So people from different parts of the world may desire American accent training…
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Common Mistakes with Prepositions – What to Guard Against
Prepositions are that class of seemingly innocuous words that indicate spatial relations – in, towards, under, etc. – that can however be rather tricky as well. Using the wrong preposition can alter the sense of what a person is attempting to convey and can also reflect poorly on their English language skills. We look at…
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The Fascinating World of Etymology
So many words that we use in common – avatar, jungle, pizza, sofa, alcohol, zero, assassin to name just a few – are not originally English. They are actually words from other languages that have seamlessly blended into the English tongue. As one of the most vibrant and assimilative of languages; English and more particularly…
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Apostrophe – The Long and Short of It
The apostrophe is that little punctuation mark that is most useful in any number of different ways. However it is also much abused – people often use it inappropriately to indicate plurals or as an appendage to pronouns. So do you cringe when you read the apostrophe appended to someone’s family name (as in Smith’s…
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Colon and the Semicolon – When to Use Which
We were all probably taught in school, the importance of punctuation and how a misplaced or absent punctuation mark can alter the meaning of a sentence completely. Among the many different types of punctuation marks – the full stop, the comma, the question mark, the exclamation mark, hyphen, brackets, there are also the colon and…
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8 Writing Tips for Beginners
It is easier for the common Joe and Jane to become a writer today than it has ever been before. It used to be that writing was an elite preserve dominated by thinkers and philosophers… basically a few who inhabited a rather rarified intellectual space. Things are far more egalitarian today – the internet and…
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About Homonyms, Heteronyms and More – Similarly Sounding/Spelled Words with Different Meanings
English is a living, breathing being. It is something that is constantly being reinvented by its various users the world over. As such, English is an utterly fascinating language. Its various aspects lend it the sort of complexity and possibility for precise articulation that some other languages may not be able to match. Today, we…