ENGLISH GRAMMAR GRADUATION

ENGNOtes In a "Just a Minute" business communication exercise, you'll present a concise, one-minute speech on a given topic, aiming for clarity, fluency, and staying on track without hesitation or repetition, showcasing your impromptu communication skills.  Here's a breakdown of how to excel in a "Just a Minute" presentation: Key Principles: Clarity and Conciseness: Speak clearly and directly, focusing on the core message within the one-minute timeframe.  Fluency: Avoid hesitations, repetitions, or digressions, maintaining a smooth flow of speech.  Confidence: Project confidence through your body language and delivery.  Structure: While impromptu, a basic structure (introduction, main points, conclusion) can help organize your thoughts.  Practice: Rehearse your delivery to improve fluency and confidence.  Tips for Delivery: Start Strong: Begin with a compelling opening statement or question to grab the audience's...

ENGNOtes The mere thought of holiday traditions brings smiles to most people’s faces and elicits feelings of sweet anticipation and nostalgia. We can almost smell those candles, taste those special meals, hear those familiar songs in our minds. Ritual marks some of the most important moments in our lives, from personal milestones like birthdays and weddings to seasonal celebrations like Thanksgiving and religious holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah. And the more important the moment, the fancier the ritual. Holiday rituals are bursting with sensory pageantry. These (often quite literal) bells and whistles signal to all of our senses that this is no common occasion – it is one full of significance and meaning. Such sensory exuberance helps create lasting recollections of those occasions and marks them in our memory as special events worth cherishing. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to value family rituals. Research shows that they can provide various psychological benefits, helping ...

ENGNOtes Last Saturday night, a young woman out on the town in Brisbane saw a dog-shaped robot trotting towards her and did what many of us might have felt an urge to do: she gave it a solid kick in the head. After all, who hasn’t thought about lashing out at “intelligent” technologies that frustrate us as often as they serve us? Even if one disapproves of the young woman’s action (or sympathizes with Stumpy the “bionic quadruped”, a model also reportedly used by the Russian military), her impulse was quintessentially human. As artificial intelligence and robotics are increasingly deployed to spy on and police us, it may even be a sign of healthy democracy that we’re suspicious of and occasionally hostile towards robots in our shared spaces. Nevertheless, many people have the intuition that “violence” towards robots is wrong. However, as my research has shown, the ethics of kicking a robot dog are more complicated than might be expected. Robots feel no pain – but what about the people ...

ENGNOtes Consumers who have a personality that scores high in terms of openness – such as being open to new adventures and intellectually curious – have better success at spotting fake reviews than other personality types, according to our recently published research. Extroverted people, on the other hand, tend to have a harder time identifying a fake review. To reach these conclusions, we compiled reviews from a unique data set of 1,600 Chicago hotel reviews, marked as either fake or real, that was compiled by artificial intelligence engineer and researcher Myle Ott and his team for peer-reviewed research they published in 2011 and 2013. Ott and colleagues mined real reviews from travel review websites such as Trip-advisor, Hotels.com and Expedite, which have a reasonably small deception rate. They gathered fake reviews by using Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit people to write fake hotel reviews that sounded truthful. We then used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit 400 participants an...

ENGNOtes Argumentative Writing and Using Evidence Many essays or academic papers involve argumentative writing. Argumentative writing goes beyond the standard argumentative essays and is important when convincing your readers of your thesis statement. Argumentative writing in some form is done in every discipline and involves presenting facts along with rational or logical statements to support your claim. With argumentative writing, you must support your claim with applicable and appropriate evidence. Additionally, argumentative writing has a tone of impartiality and directness while each piece of evidence you present has a specific purpose to support your argument. When providing evidence, you should avoid biased or subjective statements that would detract from the logic of your argument. Argumentative vs. Persuasive Writing Argumentative writing aligns with a stance but does not intend to persuade the audience to make an emotional decision. Argumentative writing is collecting and pr...

ENGNOtes A simile is a comparison between two things that uses the word like or as: Her smile is as bright as sunshine. A metaphor is a direct comparison between two things that does not use like or as: Her smile is sunshine. The word metaphor is more broad and can also refer to a variety of ways of comparing or connecting different things, including those that don’t use words at all. The difference between a metaphor and a simile is like the difference between precious metals and gems (both are valuable and useful, but one can take many more forms). Understanding this difference—and knowing how to use both—can be a jewel in the crown of your writing, making your descriptions and comparisons more colorful and engaging. See what we did here? That first sentence uses a simile, and the second uses a metaphor. But do you know what makes a simile a simile and what makes a metaphor a metaphor? Similes and metaphors are two of the most common figures of speech—expressions that allow us to mak...

ENGNOtes What is conflict resolution? Human interaction may sometimes lead to conflict, so response—and resolution—require conflict resolution strategies. Conflict resolution or negotiation is a way for the opposing parties to find a solution to their disagreement that leaves everyone reasonably satisfied. Sometimes, the person who resolves a conflict may be a neutral party or mediator while at other times, they may be someone involved in the conflict who takes an outside perspective to find a solution.The ability to resolve conflicts is often seen as a leadership trait. People who can identify conflicts, acknowledge different opinions and build a consensus are valuable to many organizations. They make it more likely for personal differences to be set aside so work can continue.Here are some of the most common reasons that conflict occurs at work:Different personalities or perspectives Unresolved problems from their past Feeling of competition with one another Poor communication skills...