Monday is Memorial Day in the U.S. – a day during which we honor those we love who have passed away and those who have given their lives to defend our country. A few days ago, I honored my mother, who passed away two weeks ago, on the ESL Podcast blog. Today I offer William Zinsser’s American Scholar essay In Memorium to honor those who have died for our country. This is the way memories should be written about.

In Memorium

When I think about Memorial Day my mind goes back to an afternoon I spent at the American military cemetery at Omaha Beach. On that vast plain of 9,386 white marble crosses, every day is Memorial Day.

It was the spring of 1994, and I was there to write a magazine article about the 50th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy. I knew that the media would reconstruct the larger saga of D-day: the armies massed in England, the mighty armada crossing the Channel, the troops wading ashore in a hail of Nazi gunfire from pillboxes on the cliff. I decided instead to focus on the last resting place of the men who died in that assault, which finally reversed the tide of World War II in Europe; I was a veteran of that war myself. I wanted to find out how the cemetery exerts its continuing power and what it might have to tell me.

The cemetery occupies a tract of American soil, donated to the United States by the French government, just above Omaha Beach–a landscape distilled to its purest elements of earth, sea, and sky. The crosses are arrayed in perfect symmetry and are immaculately kept. I began my visit by walking among the graves, reading the names of the dead. All around me, other visitors were making the same slow journey, leaving flowers, saying prayers. The date June 6, 1944, recurred with terrible frequency; for many of those young men, their first day of combat was also their last.

I went to the top of the bluff to see where all those men had come ashore. From above it looked like any other beach except that the tide went a long way out; I remembered that for part of D-day the disembarking troops had to cross a long stretch of tidal flats. I found a path that led down the cliff in a steep descent. At the bottom it wound between some dunes and deposited me on Omaha Beach. Sacred ground. I turned around and looked back and tried to imagine how it felt to be expected to capture that hill. Blind fear was all that came to mind.

I was joined by two men of about my age who appeared to be thinking the same thoughts. One of them told me that on D-day he had landed on nearby Utah Beach. The other had served in the Pacific with the Seabees, and, of the two men, he was more in awe of the feat of taking the beach. Later I mentioned this to the superintendent of the cemetery, Joseph Rivers.

“That happens very often,” he said, “and it’s one of the overlooked aspects of this place. Combatants from other theaters of war come here, and it brings it all back for them. They associate that water and those cliffs with their own memories, and they know how hard it was to take that bluff. I find it very touching.”

Many young people in their early twenties, the same age as the men who fought on D-day, come from all over the world to visit the cemetery. “Just this week,” Rivers told me, “I got letters from students in Sweden, Italy, and Brazil asking for more information. That happens a lot after a visit. The girl from Sweden asked if I could give her the name of a veteran who had fought here. She wanted to correspond with him and find out what the invasion was like for someone her age. ‘Did it make you a better person? What was your life like afterward?’ Young people ask that kind of question. To me their curiosity is comforting because most schools don’t teach this history, or it’s kept hidden. These students say they were never given the amplitude of what happened here.”

I began to glimpse what I had come to find out. The cemetery is infinitely useful. It fills whatever emotional needs are brought to it. Its most merciful gift, I think, is the gift of absolution. Rivers told me he had recently met a man who served on D-Day with a naval combat demolition unit, clearing mines and other underwater hazards. “He was walking among the graves with his two grown grandsons, both of whom were doctors, and he was very tense, very nervous. He had blocked the whole D-Day experience. He said, ‘My wife didn’t want to hear about it and my in-laws didn’t want to hear about it, so I’ve been very passive about the whole thing.’ Suddenly he opened up–for the first time in 49 years. Everything started coming back to him. He just had to get it out, and as he talked his whole frame of mind changed, and he said he felt good and he realized that he had had a satisfying life. The two grandsons stared at him in amazement. They had never seen that grandfather before.”

“When Americans who fought in Normandy come here,” Rivers said, “they see that this cemetery has given nobility to the men who died, and it relieves some of their survivors’ guilt. Most people don’t give themselves a long-range destiny; life is kind of a rambling thing. But here they look at those graves and it hits them: those men died for a set of values and they still represent those values.”

Warren Ediger

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Successful English Twitter feed nominated for Top 100

SuccEng, the Successful English Twitter feed, has been nominated as one of LexoPhile’s 2011 Top 100 Language Twitter Feeds.

The Top 100 will be chosen by a combination of votes from followers and the opinion of a professional jury. Voting is open from May 17 until May 29.

Vote now

If you’d like to help SuccEng become one of 2011′s Top 100 Twitter Feeds, you can vote here between May 17 and May 29.

Thank you very much!

Warren Ediger

The Oscars: Who calls the shots?
Volcano of Rage
“I Heard the Shots and Ran Toward the Sound”
When Irish Eyes Are Crying
America’s Gandhi: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr
A Cocktail Party in the Street
The Bull on the Mountain
The Dancer and the Terrorist

These are just a few of the titles you’ll find this month when you go to Something to read – a new Successful English feature for intermediate and advanced readers. And there’ll be a new collection of exciting articles and essays to read every month. No more looking, only reading.

Something to read features long-form journalism – longer, in-depth articles and essays about interesting people, events, and ideas. It’s more than news, different than fiction.

Important Change note: Something to read has been moved to LEARN, the Successful English blog.

• You can always find the most recent Something to read list in the LEARN: recent articles links at the bottom of the page.
• You can find all of the Something to read lists by clicking on the Something to read link in Learn: topics at the bottom of the page.

Happy reading!

Warren Ediger

RSS can help you free up time for the reading and listening that will lead to better English. Today I have some suggestions for using RSS to bring reading and listening material to you automatically so it’s there, waiting for you, when you want to read or listen.

What is RSS

RSS – really simple syndication – is a way to have things you want to read or listen to, like articles and podcasts, automatically delivered to your computer. It’s similar to subscribing to your favorite magazine and having it delivered to your house every week or month.

If you’re not familiar with RSS, RSS in Plain English from Common Craft will give you quick, simple video introduction. A transcript – written copy of the video – is also available.

Using RSS

If you don’t already have a favorite RSS reader, I encourage you to try Google Reader – it’s convenient and easy to use. For a quick introduction, watch Google Reader in Plain English.

Getting Started with Google Reader – which includes another short video – will show you how to set up Google Reader. If you need more detailed information and answers to specific questions, check out Google Reader Help.

Using RSS for your reading and listening

Most web sites now make it possible for you to be very selective – to choose only the material that you want to receive by using RSS feeds.

I receive a lot of RSS feeds every day. And most of the time, I quickly scan the headlines and only stop to read those that look important. There are some feeds, however, that I want to be sure to read. When I set up Google Reader, I made a file folder called Favorites. The important feeds go into my Favorites folder. Whenever I open Reader and see something in the folder, I stop and read it first.

You can do the same thing with your English reading and listening. Here are some examples of RSS feeds from good sources of reading and listening material:

At the ESL Podcast, there is a feed for the Podcast and a separate feed for the blog.

VOA Learning English has a page of RSS feeds that you can use to choose to receive all of their stories or choose from feeds about the U.S.A., World, U.S. History, American Life, People, Places, and other areas of interest. You can do the same thing with the regular VOA news and features.

The Economist RSS page makes it possible for you to choose from nearly 50 feeds for news, blogs, audio and video, and a variety of subject areas, such as banking, corporate leadership, and the environment.

If you want to read essays from the New York Times, you can choose a feed that includes all of their columnists, or essay writers, or only one, like David Brooks. The Times makes it possible to subscribe to almost any page – here’s an example from the business and financial news page:

When you click on the RSS icon, the RSS feed address will appear in the URL window. If you copy it and paste it into the “Subscribe” space on Google Reader, all of the new business and finance news articles will automatically come to Google Reader where you can read them.

If you’re an advanced English learner, the RSS feed from TED will bring you a new 15-20 minute video every day. TED is one of my favorite video sources for exciting new ideas.

Simply your English acquisition process

Reading and listening are the keys to better English. Using RSS feeds can free up more time for you to read and listen, and it’s easy to do:

1. Find a few good sources to “feed” your online reading and listening.
2. Set up the RSS feeds from the sources and put them into  a Favorites or My English folder in your reader.
3. Set up a regular time – every day – to go to your computer, smart phone, or iPad, open your folder and do the reading and listening that will lead to better English.

Related Reading: Spotlight – great ideas and academic English delivered to your desktop.

Warren Ediger

Many English learners would like to read to improve their English, but they can’t find books that are easy enough to understand. On the ESL Podcast blog, Lucy Tse has written an excellent post about choosing intermediate-level reading. I’d like to add some additional ideas and recommend some books my adult students have enjoyed.

Reading and listening are the best ways to improve your Engish. When you read or listen to things that are interesting and easy, you acquire, or pick up, more English. The problem when looking for books is to find the right combination – interesting + easy. Books written for young adults or teens – the subject of Lucy’s blog post – may help solve the problem.

Finding the right book

The Internet makes finding a good book easier than it used to be. One of my favorite places for book-searching is the Barnes and Noble (B&N) web site. Here is the link to the fiction and literature section of the B&N site.

On the B&N web site, most of the books Lucy wrote about are called “teen” or “young adult” books. Teen books have their own starting page. When you go there, you’ll find different categories on the left side of the page. The most popular – best selling – teen books are listed on the right side of the page. This is a great page to begin to explore for good books. And if you don’t know where to start, try using the best-seller list.

If you want to look at a specific book or a category of books, like young adult books, use the search window. Put the title of the book or “young adult” in the window and click on “Search.”

When you find a book that looks interesting, click on the cover picture or title of the book. Here is the page for Holes, one of the books Lucy recommended. Below the picture of the book you’ll see a link that says “See Inside.” If you look inside, you’ll discover that you can actually read the book at your computer.

Below the picture of Holes, you’ll also see a link that says “Read an Excerpt.” An excerpt is a small part of the book. Almost all of the books have either a “See Inside,” “Read an Excerpt,” or “Sample Chapter” link, so you’ll be able to tell if a book looks interesting and if it’s easy enough for you to understand and read.

Some of my students’ favorite books

My adult students have read and enjoyed many of the books – like the Newbery Medal books – Lucy suggested. Here some other suggestions – some of my students’ favorites:

• Lois Lowry, Number the Stars – people from Denmark help rescue Jews from the Nazis during World War II.
• Mildred Taylor, The Land; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Let the Circle be Unbroken; The Road to Memphis – these four books tell the story of a black family in Mississippi from the time they were slaves in the 1800s until World War II.
• Linda Sue Park – A Single Shard; When My Name Was Keoko – wonderful stories from a Korean-American writer.
• Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks – people from an apartment building in Cleveland get to know each other when they share a community garden started by a young Vietnamese girl.
• Karen Hesse, Letters from Rifka – a Jewish family escapes from the Ukraine after World War I; also Phoenix Rising.

Good news – many choices

When you buy a book today, you can choose from many formats, or forms. You don’t have to choose between only the traditional hardcover and paperback books. Most of the teen and young adult books are also available as eBooks, audio books on compact discs, and as MP3 books that you can download to your iPod or other MP3 player.

More information about choosing books

If you’d like to learn more about choosing books, read Using popular fiction to improve your English.

Warren Ediger

When you’re reading and meet a new word, you have several options – ignore the word and continue reading, reread the sentence or paragraph, guess the meaning from the context, ask a friend, or look it up in a dictionary. But which dictionary?

What makes a dictionary good for English learners?

A good dictionary has three characteristics:

First, the definitions are user friendly. In other words, if you’re an intermediate level English learner, the definitions are written so you can understand them.

Second, the dictionary doesn’t use other forms of the word you’re trying to understand in the definition. For example, one dictionary defines reliable as suitable or fit to be relied on. If you don’t know the verb rely or the verb form relied, the definition doesn’t help you. In contrast, another dictionary defines reliable as able to be trusted. Much better.

Finally, the dictionary includes example sentences, which are often more helpful and important for word learning than the definition.

Which dictionary should I use?

There are many choices; here are the three that I often recommend:

The best dictionary for intermediate/advanced English learners is the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. You can get it in book form or use the online version. If you buy it in book form, you can get hard or soft covers and, also, a CD version. The online version includes recorded word pronunciations.

For more advanced English learners I suggest the new edition – 3^rd – of the New Oxford American Dictionary. This dictionary comes on new Mac computers and on the Kindle reader – along with the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. It includes the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus and a feature called The Right Word, which explains the differences among similar words so you can choose the right one. It’s available on the Sharp PW-E350 electronic dictionary and, if you have an iPhone, you can get it from the app store.

If you do a lot of work online, the Encarta U.S. English Dictionary is also a good choice for more advanced English leaners. Like the Longman, the Encarta dictionary includes recorded word pronunciations.

A dictionary to avoid

You should avoid translating dictionaries if at all possible. Translating dictionaries rob you of the ability to make natural connections – in English – with the words you’re looking up. When you use a translating dictionary, you have to switch back and forth between English and your first language – a habit you want to avoid.

Translating dictionaries often give you wrong or incomplete information. For example, many translating dictionaries translate the Spanish verb conocer as the English verb (to) know. When Spanish speakers use conocer, they pick up the specific meaning from the context, from what’s being talked about. In English, we use specific verbs for the different meanings – almost 20 different verbs. Translating dictionaries frequently ignore these differences.

A final suggestion

If you haven’t read Expert answers – meeting a new word yet, you should. You’ll discover why I wrote the first sentence in this article the way I did.

Warren Ediger

If you’re a mathematics, economics, or science student and want to improve your academic English, the Kahn Academy can help you.

Improving your academic English

It’s still true:

• The best way to improve your English is to read and listen to as much English as possible at your present level of understanding, or just a little higher.
• The best way to improve your academic English is to read and listen to as much academic English as possible at your present level of level of understanding, or just a little higher.

And it’s also true that one of the best ways to make academic English more understandable – and increase your ability to acquire, or pick up, more – is to read or listen to subject matter that you studied in your own language. Your knowledge of the subject matter will help you understand the English and, as a result, acquire new academic English.

What is the Khan Academy?

The Khan Academy is a collection of more than 1800 online videos produced by Sal Kahn. The videos cover a broad range of subjects, including algebra, basic arithmetic, banking and money, biology, calculus, geometry, chemistry, financial credit, economics, differential equations, finance, linear algebra, organic chemistry, physics, probability, statistics, and trigonometry.

CNN describes Kahn’s videos as “low-tech, conversational tutorials — Khan’s face never appears, and viewers see only his unadorned (simple) step-by-step doodles and diagrams on an electronic blackboard….” Each simple, hand-illustrated video covers a single idea or mathematical operation.

Kahn got the idea for creating the videos after a cousin living in New Orleans asked him to help her with some math problems. Other relatives asked for help, and Kahn soon decided that YouTube videos would be the best way to help more people. The videos became popular with many people – more than 70,000 people watch them every day – and Khan now spends most of his time preparing new videos.

Khan is the son of immigrants from India and Bangladesh. He earned a BS degree in mathematics and a BS and MA degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He also earned an MBA from Harvard University.

The Kahn Academy videos

Here are two places you can find the Khan Academy videos:

• The Khan Academy web site
• The Khan Academy on iTunes U

Warren Ediger

Related reading:

• How to learn something (including academic English) for nothing
• Better English for medical – and other – students and professionals
• Spotlight – great ideas and academic English delivered to your desktop

If you have trouble finding books in English, ManyBooks.net is another place for you to look. ManyBooks has more than 28,000 books in their collection, books they say are “the best ebooks at the best price: free!”

In some ways, ManyBooks.net is similar to Lit2Go. Both of them are collections of public domain books – books that are no longer protected by copyright – which can be distributed freely to anyone. Even though these are older books, they still provide hours of interesting reading for many people. The collections are similar, but ManyBooks has several features that distinguish it from Lit2Go.

What’s different about ManyBooks?

On its attractive web site, ManyBooks provides several ways to look at the book collection. In addition to the ability to search the entire collection, you to can explore the ManyBooks collection by author, title, genre (type), and language.

Among the authors, look at the works of Jack London (Call of the Wild, ), Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines), Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan).

Books of the week are listed on the home page, and there are also lists of New Titles and Recommended books.

At the bottom of the Recommended page there are links to:

• New Additions
• Popular Titles
• Recent Downloads
• Special Collections
• User’s Public Bookshelves – you can create a free account at NewBooks and create a list of the books you have read and what you think of them.
• A List of eBooks in Series
• Reader Recommendations
• Random Books
• Cover Image Gallery

Each of these provides a different way of looking at or searching for books in the ManyBooks collection. If you want to be notified when ManyBooks adds new books to their collection, you can subscribe to one of their RSS feeds.

When you find a book

When you click on the title of a book you might be interested in, ManyBooks takes you to a book information page. There you will find information about the book and a link that says Show Excerpt. When you click on it, you can read a short excerpt from the book. The excerpts are long enough to give you an idea of what the book is about and how difficult it is.

One of the nice features of ManyBooks is the ability to download books in a wide variety of text formats. Almost every text format I’m aware of is in the list, including formats for smartphones and Kindle. You can also download many of the books as audio books.

Remember

The key to success, if you want to read and listen to improve your English, is to read books that are interesting and easy to understand. Take the time and make the effort to find books that are appropriate for you.

If you find a book that looks especially good in the ManyBooks collection, leave a comment so others can go look at it, too!

Warren Ediger

In a recent tweet, I encouraged readers to subscribe to William Zinsser’s Zinsser on Friday blog posts at The American Scholar (TAS). Unfortunately, I left out the link. Here are the links to the TAS web site and the blog feed

• The American Scholar web site.
• The American Scholar RSS feed – including William Zinsser’s Zinsser on Friday blog posts.

Since I included TAS in Spotlight – great ideas and academic English delivered to your desktop, several people have written to tell me how much they enjoy TAS. The articles are interesting, well-written, and understandable for many high-intermediate and advanced English learners. And Zinsser is always worth reading.

Warren Ediger

The best way to improve your writing and speaking is to read good writers and listen to good speakers! Today I’d like to spotlight three great reading and listening sources for more advanced English learners. All three of them contain a lot of academic English. And all three of them provide RSS feeds so you can feast on more great ideas and good English every time they add something new.

The American Scholar

The American Scholar (TAS) is a quarterly journal (published every three months). It’s filled with articles by and about some of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and today. Their articles focus on current events, politics, history, science, culture, and the arts.

One of my favorite writers, William Zinsser, writes regularly about writing, the arts, and popular culture for TAS. I recently recommended his book, Writing to Learn, as another good source for academic English.

TAS is in the process of putting previous issues online. When I checked, I found the last 24 issues. That’s a lot of great reading!

David Brooks, NY Times

I don’t always agree with everything that David Brooks writes, but I always appreciate his careful thought and excellent writing. He writes two columns every week about current events and American culture. New York Magazine recently ran an interesting profile (a short article about someone) of Brooks.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

TED provides a growing collection of short – 20 minutes or less – videos on important contemporary topics by many of the world’s leading thinkers, speakers, and artists. There is, literally, something for everyone at TED.

For someone who wants to develop their academic English, TED provides great variety, and each video is accompanied by a complete transcript. When you go to a video, you’ll see a link that says “Open interactive transcript” on the right side of the video. When you click on the link, the transcript opens so you can listen and read at the same time. If you want to move forward or backward in the video, you can click on the sentence you want to go to, and the video will automatically go to that sentence.

RSS feeds

RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” If you haven’t used RSS, it’s an easy way to have new material delivered to your computer whenever it is put onto the Internet. I use Google Reader to follow my RSS feeds.

Here are the RSS feeds for each of the three sources I’ve described:

• The American Scholar
• David Brooks, NY Times
• TED: Ideas worth spreading

Setting up an RSS feed in Google Reader is very easy. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Copy the RSS feed you want to subscribe to.
2. Go to Google Reader and click on “Add a subscription.”
3. Paste the RSS feed into the subscription box.
4. Click on “Add.”

In the future, whenever you open Google Reader, you will see the latest material – videos, articles, blog posts, etc. – from the sources you subscribed to.

Warren Ediger

Related reading:

• How to learn something (including academic English) for nothing
• Prepare for the TOEFL at iTunes U