People love accents! When my friend was taking a class at our university, she confessed that her professor’s posh British accent was so attractive to her that she’d close her eyes in lecture and pretend that the professor was Prince William. Several other friends specifically enrolled in classes with a particular Italian professor new to the music faculty just so they could enjoy hearing him lecture—not because they cared about the course topic. Maybe you’ve found that people admire your own accent in this way, as well, if you have one. More likely, people are just admiring your accent without telling you!
So, then, why would you want to reduce your accent in English? And how can accent reduction coaching help your writing, anyway? Accent coaching will be the most helpful for your writing if you are what some people call an auditory learner. That just means that you take in information most easily by listening to it. You might enjoy live lectures, audiobooks, or listening to the radio if you are a primarily auditory learner. You also probably use sound (heard or imagined) to figure out spellings and tenses when you write. If you’re sounding out words during the writing process, this is where your own accent can cause spelling errors. For example, if your regional accent doesn’t distinguish the short A and short E vowels, you might write “gethering” instead of “gathering.” (I saw this error in a colleague’s writing recently.) Another common issue is mixing up the pure I vowel (like in the word “see”) with the short I vowel (as in the word “it”). Certain varieties of Mandarin Chinese only use the short I, for example. Not having experience with the pure I vowel can cause writers to mix up “this” and “these”—particularly if the “Z” consonant in “these” is also not in their first language’s sound bank (as in Korean). I also recently edited a document whose author’s first language does not use the “ST” and “TS” consonant clusters, which caused that author to miss the endings on English words like “suggests” and “Tufts.” So what does this all mean? Well, if you undergo accent training (sometimes called diction training or coaching), and you learn to produce these new sounds physically and then hear them accurately, this can help you remember those sounds (and their spellings) when you write certain words whose sounds and spellings match. When I taught the aforementioned Mandarin-L1 author how to produce the pure I vowel, her ability to distinguish words like “this” and “these” immediately improved because she could now hear and produce the different “I” vowels herself while writing. This also tapped into her kinesthetic learning (learning by doing) ability because I had taught her how to move her mouth and tongue to produce the sounds. If accent coaching sounds like a helpful addition to your English studies, just get in touch with me through the Contact page to set up some sessions! As a piano accompanist who frequently coaches opera singers on pronunciation in Italian, French, and German-language repertoire, I am very experienced in coaching accent development in nonnative speakers.
0 Comments
When meeting with a client, I often make a joke that if all my clients somehow hosted a party together, and at this party they decided to subject me to a "roast" (a good-natured insult session directed at me and meant to be funny), the first thing everyone might do is imitate me saying something like "stop using so many 'of constructions'!"
Well, they wouldn't be wrong! This is among my signature writing tips, particularly when I work with a client whose first language is Korean, Arabic, or any Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are the most common Romance languages, and they share origins in Latin). These languages frequently construct phrases using the preposition "of" or something equivalent to it. Thus, when clients with these L1s (first languages) turn to English writing, they transfer these phrase constructions as well...and it doesn't always work. "What's wrong with of constructions?" you may ask. But first, you might also ask, "What is an of construction?" To put it simply, an of construction is any phrase that contains "___ of ___" or "___ of [the/a/insert another article here] ____." Such a construction is not inherently incorrect in English. It is a bit like salt on your food: sometimes you even want to add some or a phrase (like a particular recipe) specifically demands it. However, many writers will overuse the of construction to the point that the writing becomes difficult to understand, because of constructions place greater demands on the reader's working memory capacity by asking them to store more information in their head as they read the phrase. Just like when you use too much salt on your food, when you use too many of constructions, the phrase becomes difficult to digest! Even more problematic is the of chain; that is, two or more of constructions in a row. Here is such an of chain: "Garlic mustard is a member of the group of plants of the genus Alliaria." Now, even if you know exactly what garlic mustard is (it's an invasive plant in the United States), you may feel a little lost reading this phrase! It would be more concise to say "Garlic mustard is in the Alliaria plant genus" (and perhaps you could explain elsewhere exactly what a genus is). Here, I deleted all the ofs from the sentence, but you don't even need to delete them all. Just try to leave only one, at most, per sentence! Whenever you find that you've written an of construction and it's not part of an established "phrase chunk" in English (See what I did there? "Part of" is just such an established "phrase chunk" for which it's totally OK to keep that "of"!), see if you can take the word after the of and make it a possessive (or, in grammar-speak, genitive) instead. This is what I mean here: let's say you had written "the wings of the monarch butterfly" somewhere in your paper. If you take the noun after the of and make it possessive, then place it before the first noun, you would have "the monarch butterfly's wings." And that conveys the exact same meaning in fewer words! Now that I've said all this, I should clarify that you don't need to delete every single "of" from your paper every time, but trying to limit your of constructions will make your writing far clearer and more concise. In fact, when I am just beginning to work with a new client who appears to be overusing the of constructions, I will usually recommend that they try a specific exercise: write a paragraph in academic prose without using any of constructions! While this is not something you may ever have to do in your real-life papers, it's a great brain-stretching exercise that will help you write more clearly in the future. Did you try the exercise I just described? If so, let me know how it worked for you! |
Archives
June 2021
Categories
All
|