Welcome to the course!
INSTALMENT 1 - English Language Basics
Exciting News! As of right now, Busy Bee Editing is starting a brand new course. We have received many requests from people who love the English language and want to join our copy-editing team. Hitherto, we were unable to employ any new members to our team because we were simply too small to do so.
We are going to go one better for all you would-be proofreaders, editors and copy editors. We are starting an online school whereby learners in particular, but also those who are already in the industry can brush-up on their skills by benefiting from our hard-earned expertise. We have already published quite a lot of information on this subject in the FREE English course we ran a number of years ago, plus dribs and drabs repeating the basics.
What we are going to do now is to combine all the previous online information into a comprehensive course that will make it dead easy to improve your English in a simple and direct manner online, that anyone; no matter their level of expertise in English, can benefit from.
English is still by far the biggest language for business activity globally. so, anyone who wants to have a successful business career needs to be proficient in English.
Here are some basic principles that will guide
you in your writing and copy-writing journey:
Firstly; if you want to become a successful proofreader and/or editor you must read a lot. Read whatever interests you. if you are mad about sports then you could read about the life history of famous sportsmen or women you admire. If the way things work fascinates you; for example, you could read something about engineering or about flying cars! - yes, they really do exist, or self-driving cars, where you can sit in the back seat as a passenger and watch the steering wheel turning with no driver present.
The point is you must be hungry about your passion in life; whatever that might be; you need to become familiar with the English language and how it works. If you don't like printed books, you could go onto a computer and download an ebook and read it from your laptop or cellphone screen. Just Keep Reading!
A very important thing for you to learn is what makes up the basic building blocks of the English language.
The most useful formula for a sentence in the English language is;
A noun (or naming word or a thing, (such as a table, a ball or a spaceship), followed by a verb (an action word such as talk, run, speak dance), followed by another noun (naming word). The first word is referred to as the subject, which then performs an action (a verb -2nd word) against the third word (another noun or thing), which is referred to as the object.
Seen as a diagram, it looks like this:
THOMAS (naming word) THREW (verb) THE BALL (noun) - and there you have a sentence.
NOUN + VERB + NOUN
Now make up some sentences of your own such as:
the doctor treated his patient
The boxer punched his opponent
A sentence does not have to include an object.
So, the girl sang is a perfectly acceptable sentence.
So is ... Jesus wept, as in the Bible.
i.e. SUBJECT + VERB only.
In a lot of our editing tasks, the largest portion of the work is fixing the SYNTAX (meaning word order or sequence of phrases) as many writers over complicate their writing by jumbling overly-long sentences into an out-of-sequence mish-mash, which is then very difficult for readers to follow. Once the syntax is sorted-out, then the meaning of the sentence or paragraph becomes much easier to understand and it becomes a pleasure to read.
If you can follow the above principles when you write; ordering your thoughts logically as you write; your writing will become simpler and clearer.
In Instalment 2 - we will deal with pronouns and tenses.
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