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Essays should be more about how an experience affected a writer, and should give insight about the writer than just telling a story. Doing so will personalize the essay more and let the reader set the writer apart from the other thousands of applicants.

The writer can make their essay sound more personal by focusing on specific events or qualities within a larger event.

The writer needs to be able to convey how they changed or show specific qualities that they gained from events that impacted their lives. rather then just explaining a story in their lives because the admissions officer wont be able to know the real you.

This article talks about linguistic diversity in China and the many different dialects that exist in China. Before the coronavirus, China promoted Putonghua to eradicate poverty and improve the labor force. This is because, in China, not everyone speaks the standard variety of Chinese Mandarin and have to learn this standard version. However, the coronavirus has changed this fact and China started developing language resources to help those that don't speak standard Chinese Mandarin. Especially, because the outbreak was especially bad in Hubei, where residents speak Hubei Mandarin. Now, it's especially important for healthcare workers that don't live in Hubei but were sent down to help, to understand healthcare workers to be able to converse in Hubei Mandarin. It also touches on English being the global medium for scholarly articles, instead of any other language, such as Mandarin. Read this article to learn more about how the coronavirus is affecting the different dialects in China and how English is regarded in Chinese scholarly articles.

With topics ranging from slang etymology to how slang affects a culture. "Slang is a reaction to standard language. To have slang, I think you need to have a tradition of education to emphasize the importance of the standard language. You also need to have a stratified society with a certain amount of mobility in it, so very different kinds of people have opportunities to mingle. Finally, I think you have to have an established cultural tendency toward irreverence. You have to have the standard and at the same time a popular skepticism about it."

This book chapter discusses two research projects that examine how teachers/instructors view slang terms and how those views affect young people. It explains how young people have their own vernacular and how older generations who don't understand it may see "youth speak" as a threat to "standard" English.

Jaber George Jabbour, a Syrian banker living in the UK, has invented SaypU, an alphabet with none of the indecipherable squiggles of traditional phonetic alphabets. A simplified universal alphabet would end not only misunderstanding, he asserts, but would help foster world peace. SaypU contains 23 letters from the Roman alphabet as well as a back to front e. The article also addresses larger issues of language and phonetic standardization and utopian language plans.

Douglas Quenqua reports on crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, and how those projects standardize signs for commonly used science terms.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

This week's question is: What are the best ways to teach the Next Generation Science Standards to English Language Learners? In Part One, educators Alicia Johal, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, Donna Barrett-Williams, Caleb Cheung, Laura Prival , Claudio Vargas and Ariane Huddleston share their suggestions on using the NGSS with English Language Learners.

Interesting article on setting a standardized scale for literary complexity.

Prof. Suzanne Kemmer, of Rice University Course Information Course Schedule Owlspace login page Writing systems and alphabets in England English has an alphabetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet that was brought to Anglo-Saxon England by Christian missionaries and church officials in the 600s.

"Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman's theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?"

Gawker is running a competition, tournament style, to see which accent will be crowned "America's Ugliest." In the running are 16 cities in the US, and readers get to vote. Accent discrimination still thrives... Josef Fruehwald, the linguist author of this article, states, "Linguists call this general pattern "standard language ideology." It's the idea that somewhere out there, there's a perfect, unadulterated version of English, and what your everyday person speaks is a poor copy. I call it the kilogram model of language, because there is literally a physical object in France by which the unit kilogram is defined, and there are in fact multiple and worryingly imperfect copies of it around the world. But what linguists have discovered is that language is definitely not like the kilogram. The only place where English really exists is in the minds of its everyday speakers. To the extent that varies geographically and socially, so does English. There are no imperfect copies."

Schizophrenia is a very disabling psychiatric illness affecting about 2 to 3 million Americans. Contrary to popular perception, it has nothing to do with a "split personality." Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder involving "positive" and "negative" symptoms. Positive symptoms include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing visions that aren't real), delusions (fixed false beliefs), and disorganized thinking or speech. A recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry by Paul Grant, Aaron Beck, and their colleagues found that a modified version of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a specific type of talk therapy, can produce clinically significant improvement in patients with schizophrenia. Importantly, significant improvement was seen in certain negative symptoms-apathy/avolition (lack of drive)-as well as in positive symptoms. These results are impressive, especially considering that the participants had been ill for an average of 18 years and suffered from severe symptoms. In this study, study participants were divided into two groups. One group received CBT in addition to "standard treatment," which included treatment with antipsychotic medications. The other group received standard treatment alone. CBT has been shown to be effective in a variety of psychiatric illnesses. It uses pragmatic techniques to help a person correct inaccurate or dysfunctional thoughts and emotions by promoting critical comparison of those thoughts with observable facts. For example, if a person believes that he/she is "doing absolutely nothing," one CBT technique would be to encourage the person to keep a detailed diary of daily activities. The therapist would later review this diary with the patient and facts would be compared to perceptions. Homework assignments would include strategies to increase productive activities. In the study mentioned above, the researchers focused CBT "on identifying and promoting concrete goals for improving quality of life and

Choosing a voice has implications for design, branding or interacting with machines. A voice can change or harden how we see each other. Research suggests that users prefer a younger, female voice for their digital personal assistant. We don't just need that computerized voice to meet our expectations, said Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We need computers to relate to us and put us at ease when performing a task. "We have to know that the other is enough like us that it will run our program correctly," she said. That need seems to start young. Ms. Cassell has designed an avatar of indeterminate race and gender for 5-year-olds. "The girls think it's a girl, and the boys think it's a boy," she said. "Children of color think it's of color, Caucasians think it's Caucasian." Another system Cassell built spoke in what she termed "vernacular" to African-American children, achieving better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English. When tutoring the children in a class presentation, however, "we wanted it to practice with them in 'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code switching," she said. And, of course, there are regional issues to consider when creating a robotic voice. Many companies, such as Apple, have tweaked robotic voices for localized accents and jokes.

Deaf people from Philadelphia have a noteworthy, distinctive regional accent in their signg language. When most people talk about a dialect in spoken languages, and in sign languages too, a lot of what they center on are lexical differences: differences in words. In ASL, there are many, many signs that have lexical differences. For example, the (Philadelphia) sign for hospital is exceptionally different from what standard ASL would be, and among other things. To the point where the signs are not able to be deciphered based on what they look like. The historical reason for the differences between Philadelphian sign language and standard ASL: the first school for the deaf was founded by a French teacher, and therefore Philadelphia sign is more akin to French signing than American signing.

Author Karel McIntosh, a "Trini Creole" (Trinidad Creole English, a.k.a. TCE) and standard English code-switcher, reflects on how TCE is stigmatized in her homeland, arguing that the language has a rightful and valuable place. Readers may find parallels between the linguistic situation in Hawaii and that in Trinidad.

This essay compares the controversies surrounding actions taken by two school boards-one in Hawai'i and the other in Oakland-in their attempts to help students in their districts attain fluency in standard English. Public reactions expressed during each of these two incidents demonstrated a general lack of understanding about languages and nonstandard dialects. The myths and characterizations about Hawai'i Creole English and African American Vernacular English, and the issues these two stigmatized dialects have raised, point to educational policy implications concerning academic achievement and the politics of language.

This is a really useful essay in highlighting linguistic research re: how to effectively instruct speakers of non-standard varieties of English, e.g. AAVE and HCE. Nice find!

A Swedish union has set up a hotline for workers to report instances of "mansplaining" as part of a weeklong effort to raise awareness of a certain kind of condescending elocution that men use to explain to women things they already understand.

The Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese is a victim of language standardization in schools and offices, urban redevelopment and migration. To the untutored ear, the Beijing dialect can sound like someone talking with a mouthful of marbles, inspiring numerous parodies and viral videos. The dialect is a testament to the city's tumultuous history of invasion and foreign rule. The Mongol Empire ruled China in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Manchus, an ethnic group from northeast Asia, ruled from the mid-17th century into the 20th. As a result, the Beijing dialect contains words derived from both Mongolian and Manchurian. The intervening Ming dynasty, which maintained its first capital in Nanjing for several decades before moving to Beijing, introduced southern speech elements.