Writing, Listening and other things

I see that your creative writing has increased and for better. Paula’s poem/story is quite good, I especially enjoyed it.

Around here English classes are all about academic writing, academic reading and making us understand international politics, especially on how to form an opinion and applying pros and cons to the relevant issues.
Because I don’t have written anything that might be considered ‘creative’ (besides my essays), I can only leave some summaries of what we’ve been doing (basically stuff you already know):

ACADEMIC WRITING
Formality/Style
- Few/no contractions (e.g. isn’t; wasn’t; it’s, etc)
- Good/Bad (points subjectivity)
- Famous (replace by ‘well known’)
- A lot (use instead ‘a great deal of’ or ‘a large/considerable/significant’ + ‘number of’(countable) or ‘amount of’(uncountable))

*“Fanboys” are not to be used in formal/academic writing at the beginning of sentences.
F – For
A – And
N – Nor
B – But
O – Or
Y – Yet
S – So

LISTENING

Underdeveloped countries, elections in Zimbabwe, and European Union.
These are some of the topics we talk and listen on the 45min of class that deals with listening. The latest subject was “No More Mandelas” from BBC – Panorama. You can read about it or see the video we had to debate about.
Have fun!!