the Blog

My Hometown — Student Writing
A high school student from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, recently took an online 1 on 1 English class with me. We focused on his writing skills. He wrote to introduce his hometown to me; he read it out loud in class; then I made some suggestions to improve the...

Avoid “Chinglish”
(Reading level: Intermediate)English is a wonderful language for several reasons, one of which is, you can make up new words. "Chinglish" is one such made-up word. What is "Chinglish"?It refers to the garbled combination of Chinese and English. In defense of...

Juice Up Your Verbs
Verbs propel your sentences. Strong ones drive you along.Weak ones? You run out of gas. Recently in one of our online writing classes, we discussed verbs and ways to power them up. In short, try to avoid "be" verbs. Those are verbs like: am, is, was, were,...

My Summer Vacation
This is a common topic for back-to-school writing in September: "My Summer Vacation." This is from Tim, a student in Hsinchu, Taiwan, who went to Singapore with his family. His essay is a part of a larger paper on the whole week there, but here is just focuses...
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