🗺️ Don't Be 길치
The Korean phrase 길치 describes someone who has difficulty with IELTS Writing Task 1.
💬 In this week’s issue:
- Spatial Awareness. Learn how to describe changes to a location (a common prompt in IELTS Writing Task 1).
- Let's meet at 11 ante meridiem, sharp. A lot of academic vocabulary derives from Latin. How many of these phrases do you know?
- Learning together. I'm building an online school, and our first students are loving it!
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🌰 In a Nutshell
You might have noticed that I've added a cool new feature to the website. Let me tell you about it.
I'm using the website as a repository for lessons about writing. Inevitably, this requires me to reference certain grammatical terms with which English learners (or, let's be honest, even native speakers) might not be familiar.
To avoid bogging down these lessons with lengthy explanations, I've introduced a recursive tool that references a glossary.
It's going to take some time before the glossary is fully developed, but hopefully this will be a useful addition to readers.
🗺️ Describing Maps
The Koreans have a word for someone who can't find their way around: 길치.
길 means 'road, way,' and 치 is a stupid/foolish person.
I think everyone has become a little 길치 ever since we started carrying smart phones - we no longer need to give each other directions; we can just rely on Google (or Naver) to show us the way.
That's what makes describing maps - one of the most common question types in IELTS Writing Task 1 - so challenging.
After coaching a group of students who are preparing for this exam, I started to notice a common problem. Although many of these students were able to describe changes at the sentence level, their paragraphs were difficult to follow. They just didn't seem to link up.
I realized that the problem was that the focal point kept on shifting: over here this happened, over there that happened, and down here...
By working with these students I was able to develop a series of simple steps that anyone can follow to ace this IELTS Writing Task 1 question type (or to no longer be 길치).
Check out the full tutorial→
PS - You know you're working with a bright group of students when the teacher learns alongside them.
🫶 My Favorite Things️
📖 Vocabulary Builder - a fortiori, ad hoc, ante meridiem: try to identify these expressions derived from Latin phrases that begin with a preposition. Latin Expressions Starting with a Preposition (Part 1)
🧑🏫 Coaching Community - This weekend I met 1-on-1 with a few of the students enrolled in my coaching community→, which I'm hoping to open up to general admissions (with a cap of 200 students) in the next few weeks. They provided excellent feedback on how to improve the user experience. I've been working really hard on creating an online community that students find both valuable and fun.
✍️ My favorite writer - This week my all-time favorite author, Cormac McCarthy, passed away. I've been reading all the commemorative pieces that have been coming out, and my favorite has to be this one from the Santa Fe Institute→
💬 Quote
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
Writing was invented on at least three separate occasions: about 5,300 years ago in Mesopotamia, 3,400 years ago in China, and 2,700 years ago in Mesoamerica. In each case, it is probable that writing began as an accounting system. It was needed to keep records about grain storage, property boundaries, taxation, and other legal matters. Writing is more objective than memory—if you and I disagree about how much money I owe you, it's helpful to have a written record.
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