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We agree that English is a nutty language. To be fluent in English also means you have a smattering of German and French. But, there are still rules about good usage which we need to recognize, just as there are common ways to flout them. If you’re wondering what they are – here are common […]

Figures of speech or rhetorical devices help us create drama in language and call for attention. Are you familiar with the four that we’ve listed here?

Perhaps you’ve come across tips like, “Show don’t tell” or “No ideas but in things.” You’ve probably considered these tips were best used by those interested in writing poetry, features, or stories. It’s true that a poet needs to give “airy nothing” a “[l]ocal habitation and a name (Shakespeare).” But, say you’re a lawyer writing an important brief, you would do well to keep your senses in mind. Great writing is concrete. US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor advises lawyers in her memoir, “It is the particulars that make a story real.”

In 1989, ‘hobbit’, a creature from from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes as no surprise that Tolkien, who is considered the godfather of fantasy writing thanks to his genre defining Lord of the Rings, had a word from his fictional universe recorded in the […]

By Rajveer Sardana It struck me as unjust that these stories weren’t available in Hindi. That their magic was lost for some children because of the circumstances of their birth. Little faces stare up at me, bursting into cries and requests “One more story bhaiya! Please!”” I cannot resist them. I reach into my backpack […]

When stepping out of your comfort zone to study abroad, learning a new language is often one of the major reasons. At least it was for me when I traveled westward from Germany as a foreign exchange student to spend a year at an American high-school. For me, learning a language in a classroom, online, […]

There are no rules to winning at life, but here are 5 rules to winning at emails. Do you groan at the thought of reading a long, boring email? If your answer is yes, you’re just like us. No one likes to go through a sloppy email without a beginning, a middle, or an end. […]

Author: Pratibha Alagh What if we told you English belongs to same language family as Dutch – Germanic, but that it has more features in common with French, an offspring of the Romance languages? Strange, right? But, when it comes to languages, it’s not all about the roots. What is at play is another very […]

Every year since 1976, the Lake Superior State University publishes an annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use, and General Uselessness. Although the first list was inspired by the pet peeves of LSSU’s late public relations W.T. Rabe and his friends, the list is now culled from thousands of international […]

I came to Portsmouth to study for the BA (Hons) in Architecture. And it was the best decision I ever made. The city itself is a nice place because it is located on the south coast of England. It is known as the ‘’Great Waterfront City.’’ Right on the waterfront is where our University of […]