Title:
Need Help With Your Writing? Try This Web Site
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Many colleges and universities in the United States
have writing centers to help students improve their
skills. Some materials are available free at Web
sites like the Purdue Online Writing Lab, or OWL.
The site is connected to the Writing Lab at Purdue
University in West Lafayette, Indiana. It includes
resources that can help non-native English speakers.
VOA's Art Chimes recently spoke with the director,
Linda Bergmann. She said the Purdue Online Writing
Lab is a collection of workshops, worksheets and
instructional materials.
For example, even native speakers are often not sure
when to use "lie" and when to use "lay." The site
gives these example sentences: "After laying down
his weapon, the soldier lay down to sleep." "Will
you lay out my clothes while I lie down to rest?"
The problem is that "lie" also means to not tell the
truth, as in "I lied to my mother." So you would say
in the past tense "I lay on the bed because I was
tired."
The Purdue Online Writing Lab also explains how to
use an apostrophe correctly in possessives and other
cases. People often add an apostrophe to "its" in a
sentence like "The group made its decision." There
should be no apostrophe because what you mean is
that the decision belongs to the group. "It's" with
an apostrophe is short for "it is," as in "It's
raining."
The Purdue Online Writing Lab also explains how to
organize papers and avoid plagiarizing other
peoples' work. And it provides a guide to higher
education in the United States, including
explanations of commonly used terms.
Director Linda Bergmann says the goal is to provide
as many tools as possible. They include basic
language skills of agreement of subject and verb,
use of commas and other punctuation and complete and
incomplete sentences. The Web site was started in
nineteen ninety-four and has plenty of fans.
Linda Bergmann says: "We get a lot of thank you
notes from people around the world. And also some
schools in other countries use it as a writing
handbook, as do some schools in the United States."
In all, the Purdue Online Writing Lab offers over
two hundred free resources for writing and research.
The address is owl.english.purdue.edu.
For a link, and to learn more about higher education
in America, go to our Web site,
voaspecialenglish.com.
And that's the VOA Special English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
