I thought finance was bad, with an acronym for every product, project, client, and project management technique under the sun.
This year I’ve been studying the Master of Teaching in Queensland, and I’ve discovered that the education industry is no different.
Leaders ❤ acronyms.
Below is the list of acronyms I’ve compiled in just a few months, but please, help me understand what’s going on here! Tell me what other acronyms I need to know to become a teacher. 😉🙏
I was diagnosed with combined type ADHD about a year and a half ago, so technically, I am one of the many adult learners with a learning disability.
But even before I knew that, making learning about reading and writing accessible was one of my main passions in life.
So while I’ve been doing my Master of Teaching, I have been dyyyyyyying on the inside while trying to read all these academic texts. Almost none are written accessibly!
Academics are out here talking a great game about how we should make education inclusive and accessible to everyone … but when I read their writing, I experience true mental and physical anguish.
I noticed this week that I was getting annoyed that one of my teaching textbooks consistently uses “practice” every time, when they actually should be using the verb “practise” in some sentences.
How do you know when to use practice or practise?
To practise is a verb that means you’re doing the same action or process over and over, usually over time, to get better at that action or process. For example…
Happy holidays, everyone! I’ve made it through nearly the whole year without ranting about this, which I’m kind of proud of.
I cannot tell you how many books – both traditionally published and indie/self-published books – I’ve seen using the word “smirk” where it doesn’t belong.
A smirk is a one-sided smile. It can be smug, proud, fake, unpleasant, etc.
The easies way to remember the difference between a smirk and a smile is that if a person’s smirking, they’ve either won against the others, or they’re hiding something from the others (could be a good secret or something bad, doesn’t matter).
For example:
‘Merry Christmas,’ said the Grinch with a smirk. Later that night, he planned to press the big, red button in his lair and blow up all the presents.
But if a person’s happy, but not bragging or teasing or hiding a secret, they’re just smiling.
Can’t there be different types of smirk?
Yes, absolutely.
Damon from The Vampire Diaries is the classic example of the many different types of smirk. No one pulls off a smirk like Damon, and he does it in so many different ways or moods.
Here are some of the best examples I could gather for you of his different smirking styles…
Examples of Damon smirking in The Vampire Diaries
Cunning or evil smirk – like in the first few seasons:
You can’t tell what he’s thinking or planning – but the key is that his eyes are not smiling.
Playful or teasing smirk – Damon gives this type of smirk almost every time he interacts with Bonnie – once they become besties, that is.
Arrogant smirk – whenever Damon thinks he’s winning, or he’s managed to fool someone, you see this type of smirk… This screenshot is not the best because he’s talking, but you get the idea:
Loving smile that is sometimes a smirk – you could call Damon’s one-sided smile a smirk sometimes when he’s with the main character, Elena, because he’s hiding a secret from her. (Secret is: he loooooves her. Spoilers for 2011, I guess?)
This is the smile of someone who is proud of themselves for eliciting a reaction from their lover, or proud of their lover.
This versatility in expressions is just one of the many reasons why everyone loved to watch Ian Somerhalder play him in the 2000s and 2010s.
Damon was also a really well-rounded character, but I think I’ve fangirled enough for one post!
Incorrect times to say “smirk”
Sometimes a smile isn’t a smirk – it’s just a smile.
In a lot of novels I see these days, the male love interest is often smirking at the female hero – but not intentionally – he’s actually just smiling.
He’s not teasing her…
He doesn’t have bad intentions to pull one over on her…
He isn’t proudly smirking because he’s elicited a reaction from her…
He’s just smiling – so to say he’s “smirking” feels really jarring and just plain weird.
It makes the reader go, “Wait, what am I missing here? I thought this dude was in love with her?”
Pop quiz: Do you think Damon is smirking or smiling in this picture?
It’s almost time to say happy new year and good riddance to 2023, so here’s how to write about dates and years in 2024.
This is based on the Australian government’s style manual and the most common usage that I’ve seen over the past few years as an editor of digital content.
The longest day of the year is fast approaching… or on the other side of the world, their shortest day of the world! So I thought we’d talk about how to write dates and days correctly in business writing.
(Image source: AI artwork of cats sitting next to window, watching fireworks, generated using Gencraft.com.)
Someone recently asked me when to use each of the different variations of “assure”, “ensure”, and “insure”.
And as always, I didn’t just answer their question – I said I’d try to think of a way you can remember the difference more easily.
So I did!
Difference between assure vs ensure vs insure (verbs)
Assure = to reassure someone that everything is as it should be.
e.g. I can assure you that my team will meet its budget this financial year.
You can remember this because you can replace it with “reassure you”, which literally includes the word “assure”. If you type “reensure”, you’ll know it’s not going to work.
Ensure = to make sure that something does / doesn’t happen.
e.g. My team needs to ensure that it meets its budget for this financial year.
Insure = to get insurance against a bad event happening.
e.g. To insure against the risk of spending too much, my team will look at its budget once a month until the end of the financial year.
Difference between assurance, ensuring, and insurance
What does that look like when you’re using the noun version instead of the verb?
Assurance:
e.g. Can you give me any assurance that your team will meet their budget this financial year?
You can remember this because in this sentence, you want to be reassured, and the “assure” word within “reassure” is the same as in the noun “assurance”.
e.g. Can you reassure me that your team will meet their budget this financial year?
Ensuring:
There’s no such word as “ensurance” to match “assurance”, so instead, you would use the word “ensuring”.
e.g. Is there a way of ensuring that my team will definitely meet their budget?
This is the same as saying “making sure”.
Insurance:
e.g. If my team doesn’t meet their budget, do we have any insurance to protect against breaking the business unit’s forecast?
You can remember the difference between insurance and assurance because the cost of insurance these days is definitely not “reassuring”.
Image source: memegenerator.net
(C) All content written by TJ Withers, 2023. Give credit when sharing or reposting. Thank you!
Today is all about how we talk about how many years old something or someone is, or how many years in a row we’ve won an award.
When is it “years old” vs “#-year-old”?
“Years old” is the most common and most reader-friendly way of talking about how old something or someone is (in Australian English).
e.g. CompanyX is more than 100 years old.
You always use hyphens for “#-year-old” because it is either used as an adjective (similar to how you put a hyphen in “award-winning”) … or it is a noun on its own (in which case it is a compound word, two or more words stuck together).
Not using hyphens here is a common mistake.
e.g. Adjective: CompanyX is the largest 100-year-old organisation in Queensland.
e.g. Noun: My 2-year-old is very tall for her age.
When is it “age” vs “aged” vs “years of age”?
Beware of using “age” when you could be using the reader-friendly phrase “years old” instead. I always used to see this often when updating our member-facing forms; it would say “If you are age 55 / 60 / etc.” instead of “If you’re 55 years old”.
e.g. If you are aged 55 years or over, please fill in this part of the form. >>> For readability, it’s easier to say “If you are 55 years old or over”.
e.g. Start planning your retirement before you reach the usual age for stopping work.
e.g. My daughter is only 2 years of age, so she’s not thinking about retirement yet. She is not yet of an age to retire. >>> For readability, it’s easier to say “only 2 years old”.
e.g. This coming-of-age novel is a good read.
Lastly, “year” and “years” can be used in a few different ways.
e.g. CompanyX has won the Platinum rating from SuperRatings for more than 10 years in a row.
e.g. In the year 2020, lots of people began working from home, and it was also my third year working at CompanyX.
e.g. CompanyX has been taking care of clients for more than 100 years.
e.g. Our current investment approach was initiated around 10 years ago, after the GFC.
e.g. You could say someone is wise beyond their years.
Image source: Collegedunia.com
Any other ways of talking about time and age that you’ve seen tripping people up?
(C) TJ Withers-Ryan, 2022. Please credit me when you share or repost. Thanks!
I think most people, whenever they think about using “whom” in a written sentence, stop and wonder whether they’re doing it right.
Psychological reassurance: The reality is that this is one case where you can probably relax, because most people speak English differently to how we write English. If you write “who” every time, it’ll look fine, because this is almost always the word people use when we’re speaking. Because “whom” sounds pompous out loud, almost nobody says it, even when grammatically they should. So when you write “who”, even if it should be “whom”, most people reading it will think, “Yeah, I’d say ‘who’. That looks fine to me.”
But if you still really care about writing it correctly, then let’s get word nerdy!
Request of the day today is about the word “data”.
The companies I’ve worked for in the past ~8 years in the finance industry involve a lot of data, and we have to talk about it a lot, depending on your role in the corporate world.
Is data singular, or plural, or other?
In Australia, “data” is treated as a mass collective noun that you treat as singular, just like “information”.
e.g. The data was collected. There wasn’t much data available.
>>> In this sentence, we use the singular words “was” and “much” instead of the plurals “were” and “many”.
(This bit is in brackets because it’s not essential reading: I tried really hard to think of a way to explain what a mass collective noun is, but couldn’t think of anything clever. Basically, it is a noun for a group or a volume of things where you can’t count that noun. You can’t say one data, two datas.)
In addition to being a noun, you can also use “data” as an adjective.
e.g. ProgramX is a data system. (adjective + noun) This means it is a system that collects, stores, and uses data. (noun)
Why data changed from being plural to mass collective/singular over time
Historically, “data” was a Latin word that was the plural of “datum”. (A single point of data is a datum.)
For this reason, some traditionalists in the USA like to still use “data” in its Latin (plural) form.
e.g. The data were collected, but there was one point of datum that I want to talk about.
But we don’t do that here in Australia.
From about the 1900s, common usage has evolved, and even the Oxford English Dictionary accepts that we now use “data” as mass collective/singular.
Bonus word of the day:
There’s another Latin word that we have transformed from “plural >>> singular” over time: your “agenda” for a meeting.
In Latin, “agendum” is singular and “agenda” is plural, but in English, we don’t say “agendum”.
We say “agenda” and we treat it as “singular”.
e.g. The agenda (singular) for that meeting was long, and the items (plural) on the agenda were boring.
Image source: MemeGenerator / Star Trek.
(C) TJ Withers-Ryan, 2022. Please credit me when you share of repost. Thanks!
TJ Withers 