Category Archives: Uncategorized

Marketing Networking

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Recently, I’ve had some questions about networking and volunteering in Vancouver. A friend of mine told me about a marketing event that looks really interesting. It’s called ProductCamp, and will be held next Saturday, March 8th, at the Beedie School of Business at SFU. The address is 500 Granville Street, and admission is free. You can read about the plans, register, or volunteer at their website: productcampvancouver.org.

Go Volunteer is a job-search website for volunteers. There’s a great variety of positions available, each with different time commitments, areas of specialty, and locations. I just saw ads for a bartender at a salsa dance, a hospital communications specialist, a cook, social service providers, and seniors’ care helpers. Many of the advertisements offered discounts or benefits for their volunteers, and most offer letters of recommendation or references too.

There’s one for just Burnaby-based jobs at volunteerburnaby.ca

No volunteering post would be complete without my favourite causes:
Bike racing at the Burnaby Velodrome – they need volunteers for the night of March 21st
Technology and environmental work at Free Geek Vancouver

Remember to put your Canadian volunteer experience on your resumé, too. Use it to show that you are familiar with local people, customers, and business culture. Good luck and happy volunteering!

Listening Skills and Podcasts

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The best way to get better at listening is by… listening. Many students use movies or music to practice, but what about podcasts? They usually have natural, spoken English, and they can help with vocabulary as well. The presenters can be anywhere in the world, and that means different accents and slang.

Some of my favourites are This American Life, Stuff You Should Know, Planet Money, and Radiolab. BBC Documentaries is a great source of world news stories in more detail than you will find on TV or the radio.

Happy listening!

Free Software

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I know that software can be expensive, especially for complex or business-oriented packages. However, there are some excellent free programs that do what the expensive stuff does.

Photoshop? GIMP
Sound recording? Audacity
Microsoft Project? Project Libre
Microsoft Office? Apache OpenOffice, NeoOffice, and LibreOffice

There are also cloud services, where you use software over the Internet.

Google Drive is great for wordprocessing, making presentations, and spreadsheets, just like Office is.

Dropbox is a way to share files and folders with your colleagues.

And of course, if you need a cheap computer to run it all, check out Free Geek Vancouver.

Worried about Presentations?

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I used to be shy. Speaking in public was a bit scary, too, so I took a course in acting when I started teaching. My confidence improved, as well as my listening and speaking skills. In my class of 12 people, there were three ESL students!

The instructors are all professional actors, and the class was a lot of fun. If you are ready to upgrade your public speaking, conversation, and listening, check out the Vancouver Theatersports League on Granville Island. The course is called Level 100, and takes two weekends to complete.

Talking about your business

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Have you run into problems with business vocabulary? Perhaps you can’t think of the right word, or maybe you’re not sure if an expression is formal or not. I discovered these three word lists that can make your writing or interviewing easier.

 The first one is is a list of 94 business verbs. Use them in your resume or cover letter to tell an employer exactly what you did at your last job.

Second is a list of 97 business nouns. You could use them to describe job duties, transactions, or responsibilities at your last company.

The last is a list of over 200 action verbs, and it includes both business vocab and general English. These will also help you add detail to your cover letter or resume.

Citing your Writing

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When you start university, you will find that professors require citations for other people’s ideas that you talk about in your paper. There are two common arrangements: MLA, from the Modern Languages Association, and APA, from the American Psychological Association. It’s tough to keep them consistent. MLA is most commonly used in the humanities, while APA is found in the sciences.

As a student, you will need to use correct citation forms. By using Son of Citation Machine, you can be sure that your work is up to university standards.

Latin words in English writing?

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Teaching a writing class leads to some awesome questions from my students. As a result of an interesting discussion, today I’ll show you how to use ‘i.e.’ and ‘e.g.’ in formal academic papers. They are both Latin abbreviations, but their meanings are different.

e.g. is Latin for “exempli gratia.” In English, we say “for example.” I like many things about Vancouver, e.g. the weather, the people, and the restaurants. (Some people remember this one as “examples given.” Not technically a good translation, but it works.)

i.e. is Latin for “id est.” In English, this means “that is to say.” We use this to introduce more specific detail about a topic. “We weren’t ready for this project, i.e. we needed to do more preparation before we started.”

There are two more expressions from Latin that we see in writing: et cetera and et al.

et cetera is Latin for “and more of the same.” People often use this at the end of a list to show that there are more possible things. The store sells everything for your body, including makeup, soap, shampoo, et cetera. If you use it as an abbreviation, write “etc.” This is not as commonly used as it once was, because it gives an impression of the author being too lazy to finish the list.

et al. is Latin for “of other things/places/people.” This is most often used as an abbreviation in a bibliography, to show that many authors wrote a paper. If John Smith, Joan Doe, Jane Brown and Joe Robinson wrote a paper together, a common citation in the text is Smith et al. “According to Smith et al., the main problem is…” Notice that there is a period after al, because it is an abbreviation.