My one-day seminar ”The Elements of Composition” offers you the opportunity to revise your written English skills and refresh your memory on some easy but very useful language rules!

I am happy to announce that the venue is ARS in Vienna’s first district, where you can spend the day sharpening your skills in a comfortable and very well organised environment. Coffee and snacks as well as a mouthwatering lunch buffet make sure that you have enough food for thought.

 The next date is 27 June 2011; so secure your place while you can.

 Just follow the link to print out the brochure with all the details you need: http://www.ars.at/pdf/IW092419.pdf

I hope to see you there in June!

Akademie für Recht, Steuern & Wirtschaft

Schallautzerstraße 2-4

1010 Wien

Tel: (01) 713 80 24-27

Fax: (01) 713 80 24-14

office@ars.at

The comma is not the only punctuation mark in the world! There is also the semicolon (;): an often neglected and ignored character.

The semicolon is somewhere between a comma (,) and a full stop (.) (or period in US English). We use it to join two complete sentences to make one single written sentence. The reason is that when two sentences are very closely related, a full stop would make two separate sentences, and that could be too strong a separation. You can also use a comma to join two complete sentences, but that would require a connecting word such as “and” or “but”, and that could interrupt the flow the two sentences create together.

Here is a famous example by Charles Dickens from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Dickens could also have written

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

or

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

However, the semicolon indicates that the writer sees the two smaller sentences as being more closely related than two consecutive sentences. On top of that, it carries a lot more impact this way.

So, that’s all for today folks!

Until next time,

Julia  

Reference:

Trask, R.L., (1997), The Penguin Guide to Punctuation, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-14-051366-3

New workshop: The Elements of Composition

Composition: the art of putting words and sentences together in accordance with the rules of grammar and rhetoric.

Engineers, managers, lawyers and everyone else who needs to be able to express themselves well in written English should be interested in this new seminar. Whether you write business reports, articles for trade journals or are working on a thesis or dissertation, this course will show you the technicalities of organizing your writing according to correct English usage.     

This seminar looks at the most significant elements of composition, usage and approaches to style common to the English language. The main message conveyed throughout the seminar will be: CLARITY – write for the reader!

The objective is to look at and practice:

• Sentence structure
• Paragraphing
• Punctuation and capitalization
• Achieving clarity
• Word choice
• Approaches to style
• Effective Planning