The paragraph for the Literacy Volunteers of Leon County is
due tomorrow, and Divino has indeed come up with a few good points. We went
over it last night, and there were only a couple of things that needed to be
corrected, which we usually do together. First I reminded him that in English,
in the title or headline all keywords (or at least the keywords) are
capitalized. In other languages, for example French, and maybe in his mother
tongue Portuguese as well, you only capitalize the first part which could be
the first noun preceded by an article, or something like that, while the rest
is lowercased.
There were a couple of preposition issues, “being part of”
versus “participating in”, or “getting better at
doing something” while one can say, “to get better in English”. However, it
is not possible to say “I am getting better on English”. Divino sometimes
still translates directly from his native Portuguese, however, he does it less
and less, and prepositions are, anyway, so difficult to study and remember in
so many languages.
Divino used the word “peoples”, and although the word
exists, it is not the plural of “people”, I explained. I gave him examples and
contexts when to use “peoples”. He definitely wanted to use the word “people”
when he wrote the following: In the beginning “I didn’t feel comfortable
speaking among a lot of people[s] and strangers”.
No comments:
Post a Comment