August 3, 2013

Weekly Finds: August 3, 2013

A Man With Magnifying Glass by digitalart
Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Every week, we’ll be sharing a list of posts, stories, news, or opinions that we've run across the Internet during the past week or two. We won't be discussing them in detail here, but we do encourage you to check them out as they could contain valuable ideas and insights for your IELTS exam.

If you're ready, here we go...

LISTENING


How to pronounce ‘H’ in English — not ‘A’ or ‘R’!

Learn how to distinguish between words that begin with A, R and H!

READING


A Figurative Battleground: 'The Language Wars: A History of Proper English'

Language is battlefield and, like it or not, we're all soldiers.

WRITING


Why most academic writing sucks

Here's a funny way to describe what academic writing is.

SPEAKING


How to inspire people every time you speak

The author shares the power behind telling stories.

GRAMMAR


How Texting and Instant Messaging (Techspeak) Hurt Your Grammar

A study has revealed that the more students, the more it may impact their grammar – students who use techspeak a lot, may have trouble switching back to traditional grammar when needed. Research suggests the use of abbreviations, word substitutions, acronyms, and emoticons, are all major contributors to this decline.

VOCABULARY


20 Words We Owe to William Shakespeare

Endlessly imaginative and not overly concerned with grammatical convention, Shakespeare’s scripts contain over 2200 never-before-seen words—a diverse collection of loan-words from foreign languages, compound words from existing English terms, nouns turned into verbs, and creatively applied prefixes—many of which have entered into everyday language. Here are 20 examples of words we can thank Shakespeare for.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT


Feeling Anxious? Think Again.

A team of psychological scientists has been exploring the interplay of thinking, attention and physiology in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Jeremy Jamieson of the University of Rochester, Matthew Nock of Harvard and Wendy Berry Mendes of UC -- San Francisco designed two studies to sort out these aspects of the disorder and, beyond that, to test a simple intervention that might diminish the unpleasant symptoms of social anxiety.