Grammatical status: BACK TO THE BASICS

Dear guys,

I decided to update my personal status in terms of errors ;-) I think that this is a very useful and effective way to remember my grammar mistakes and disgusting and horrible expressions..hi hi..and to avoid them. The key-word of today is SIMPLIFY in order to achieve a higher level of accuracy!

First: I really MUST keep in mind the structure SVO in order to avoid the use of intricate constructions, of fragments and run-ons.
Here you are some examples:
I didn't find IT very difficult
Feeds will help me to save A LOT OF updates (NOT 'a huge amount of')

Second: subordinators are NEVER preceded by a comma
Examples: after, while, until, so, since, in order to, despite, although, even if, unless, if,...

Third: I must LIMIT the use of : Present Perfect, also, such, have to, can/could

I hope and think that this could be useful for you, too ;-)

Bye!

Elisabetta

Reflective Bloggin: SOCIAL BOOKMARKING-Part II

Hi guys!

Today I'm going to write again about social bookmarking. Indeed, now we know what it is and I can suggest some interesting examples to you. During these last few days I looked at my peer's bookmarks about learning English and this thanks to the network I created on Delicious.I'm incredibly technological! Among their bookmarks I found some websites that could be useful for you and for me, in order to improve our English and I noticed that some of the links are the same. For example, I want to mention Anna's choice about www.learn-english-today.com because I chose it too ;-) Indeed, in this website we can find lists of idiomatic expression and proverbs, business vocabulary, exercises and wordgames as well. About Michela, I found Grammar Gang really useful; it is a blog which provides tips to improve our writing skills. Moreover, the fact that this is a blog means that it is continually updated and we can learn new things almost every day. Among Cristina's chioces I found Reuters very interesting. This website can be defined as a news service where we can find especially videos and recording on financial issues. So, the goal of this week is to practice English through these web-sites.HAVE FUN!

Elisabetta

Rainy Spring..

All this rain makes me so melancholic...I think that rain is wonderful when you are lying in your bed and you can listen to its relaxing sound..but ONLY in that case!! Don't you think?

Elisabetta

Reflective Blogging: SOCIAL BOOKMARKING- Part I

Hi guys!

..and the prize for the Brand-new discovery of this week goes to...drum rolls...Social Bookmarking (together with the awareness that I'm really uncultured about the Internet world)! Fortunately this course is taking me to a new level of knowledge about the useful things I can do thanks to the Internet! This week I discovered the existence of Social Bookmarking and, in particular, of Delicious...what a beautiful name! This service allows people to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. Indeed, Delicious is a community where you share the information you have found on the Web with other people with the same interests. If you want to add me as a friend my username is elisabettazambolin....ok I know I'm not very creative but what can I do? ;-) If you want my personal suggestion, all the sites I tagged with bloggingenglish_09 are useful in order to improve our English and our pronunciation but my favourite one is www.tv.com. Here you can find full episodes and clips of series, shows, movies,...now I'm going to watch an episode of Family guy so....see you and have fun with your favorite programmes!

Elisabetta

About pics...

Hi everybody!

I know that there have been problems of copyright about the use of pictures and I don't want to be in troubles. For this reason, I decided to 'embellish' my posts with my own photos (except for that about feeds, I really can't find a picture that could suit!). What do you think about them? You know.. I'm not a photographer and I've never been passionate about photos, may be a new interest could rise inside my heart! I posted pictures taken during my travels (for the moment I used two pics about Munich and one about Elba Island), but yesterday morning I decided to experiment new subjects! So, I went out in my garden and took some photos of my mother's flowers..she takes so much pride in them! Let's see what will happen in the next weeks....and let me know if you like them ;-)

Elisabetta

Opinion-poll..

Hi guys!

Under my profile you can find an opinion-poll (I LOVE them!) about my blog..if you have time look at it and give me suggestions ;-)

Elisabetta

Reflective Blogging: RSS

Hi everybody!

Today I'm very happy and optimistic..a lovely sunny Sunday and a new discovery about the Web! I have to admit that I had no idea what feeds and RSS were: I often wondered about what those nice orange icons were and NOW I have the answer! The most important thing is that I realized they are really useful; indeed, their function is to 'tell' me when my favorite blogs and websites are updated. In this way, I don't need to look at them ten thousand times a day in order to see when new posts appear. Moreover, with Bloglines I can arrange and divide them into playlists and read the new posts directly from this site..isn't it useful? Of course it is! Think about this: I can stay in touch with the members of my group, with the course blog, with world news from CNN, with articles from National Geographic,..all in one single page! However, not all websites have feeds, or may be their icons are so little I didn't see them..but why? I think they are really helpful and everybody should use them.....thanks for this new discovery!

Elisabetta

(PS This image source is www.fasticon.com)

Apologies..

I want to apologize because I realized that my last post was very long..a bit too much!I'll try to be more concise in the future...forgive me ;-) I hope it's not too late...

Apologize...

Elisabetta

My first Reflective Blogging

Today I'm going to write my first 'Reflective blogging' post! During this semester I'm going to write similar posts quite often because they entail reflecting on my learning process and creating a sort of diary of my improvements. Moreover, in this way I know that I MUST work on them each week if I want to have my conscience cleared ;-)
Unluckily I wasn't in class last week so I didn't work on my learning targets. However, I reflected for a while and I can say I need and I want to improve my spoken interaction and my writing. The former because sometimes I'm a bit shy and, as I speak, I become nervous and I make a lot of mistakes and try to correct myself while speaking and performing too long sentences. The latter because I want to improve and enrich my vocabulary and my style, indeed when I write I sometimes create very long and complex sentences. Furthermore, I want to work on them because they are going to be very important for a future job and, more in general, for the interaction with foreign people. I think that during this week I had to deal with them in different ways. About my writing, I worked on an analysis of a job offer (one of our assessments with Professor Taylor), I read some articles for my thesis and I'm working on my blog. About my spoken interaction, I tried to participate actively to our lessons in class and I offered to do a Power Point presentation for Professor Taylor. I think that our Thursday lesson was very useful for both my goals, indeed we had to correct in groups the comments we wrote. So, I could interact with other people and learn how to correct our most common mistakes (I have to admit that correcting our comments wasn't that easy!). Moreover, I had to present the blog I found (Dumb Little Man, you can find it on my favorite blogs) and one of my class mates and describe them in a critical way.
I think in the blogsphere I can find many examples of good formal and informal texts that can be useful for me and for improving my writing and my vocabulary, both in technical and everyday fields. Moreover, I can find videos and interviews that I can listen to in order to improve my pronunciation and have examples of fluent chats and talks. So, let's work on them!

Bye guys!

Elisabetta

Welcome guys

Hi everybody! This is my first experience with blogging, so be patient with me because I'm still working on the lay-out of my blog. My first impression is that this is going to be a very exciting and interesting experience to live together. I hope we could interact and help each other learning ad achieving new goals..so please leave comments with suggestions whenever you want! I think that with this blog I can improve my writing and analytical skills and I can enrich my vocabulary. Furthermore, the use of informal language is very important for my future everyday life and career, because people normally don't speak as academic professors ;) So, I'm going to write soon and often posts 'for fun' and 'for learning'!
Bye!

Elisabetta