All change ...

Well, so much for 'Good to be back!'.

No sooner had I promised to be a good blogger from now on than I found myself even deeper in deadlines than before. So sorry especially to thise of you who commented during my latest absence. I promise I will respond ... as soon as I get through my latest deadlines.

Actually, my current deadline is a bit artificial - I'm off to Ireland for a week in the middle of nowhere tomorrow, with no internet access, no TV, no nothing. It's going to be great - enforced absence from all my online commitments. But it means I've got to get everything done tonight!!!!!

Anyway, I've called this post 'All change', because I've gone and got myself a new job. I'm now an editor for English 360, which is very exciting (I mean the fact that I got the job - editing itself isn't all that exciting, although I do find it strangely relaxing).

I'll post properly about my new job soon, I promise. (Although, judging by recent performance,'soon' might be a bit of a stretch). In the meantime, you can read my interview with Cleve Miller, the man behind English 360, which I did last year. It's strange how things work out, isn't it!

My other commitments haven't changed. I'm still very much Series Editor of Cambridge English for .... Book six in the series, Cambridge English for Marketing, is out this week, which really is exciting. To find out more, check out Nick Robinson's new blog, English4Marketing. Nick is the author of Cambridge English for Marketing. Again, I'll blog about it properly soon, but I did actually mention it here back in February.

On the subject of new blogs, another great ESP writer, Virginia Allum, has set up a blog called English for Nursing and Health, which should be really useful for teachers of medical English.

Anyway, now Cambridge English for Marketing is out there, it means I'm officially only working on four books at the moment, although there are a few more in the pipeline. Easy life ...

Right, better get on with some work. Thanks for your patience, and hopefully I really will be a more conscientious and reliable blogger one day ... if I can just get these books finished!

Legal English blogs

There are a couple of new legal English blogs that I've become aware of in the last week of so.

The first one is called Legal English Teacher, and it's been created by my old friend Andrew Nathan. (Observant readers will notice this is the same friend I mentioned a few weeks ago in this post as an example of someone who has become a real expert through years of teaching in a particular ESP field). Not one to shy away from the big issues, Andrew has kicked off with a piece on the plain English vs legalese debate. If you thought that debate had been long settled, think again.

Andrew's blog led me to this one from Wayne Schiess on Legal Writing. This blog seems to be aimed at native English-speaking lawyers and law students, but it has plenty of lively and pertinent ideas useful for those of us who teach the same skills non-natives.

Another new blog that I've just become aware of is Jeremy Wheeler's Anglaw Budapest. Jeremy is in the process of setting up a new centre for legal English in Budapest, and promises to keep us informed of the joys (or otherwise) of getting the school off the ground, as well as tips for teaching legal English. Sounds great.

Also, Translegal has a new Legal English Blog, which seems like a great resource. As well as building our vocabularies (and our students'), we'll find out about common mistakes, drafting tips, recommended reading, and things like that. I noticed this week that Translegal have also launched their own online dictionary for non-native learners of legal English. Excellent ... although there's an annual subscription fee to access all the really exciting content.

I've already mentioned in a previous posting Margaret Marks' nice blog for legal translators, Transblawg.

Finally, I can't forget the trusty old EULETA discussion group. Although it's not a blog per se, it's still the best source for LE tips, lively debates and gossip. Well, perhaps not the gossip, but you never know ...

Please do let me know (in the comments section) of any more good LE blogs. Cheers and happy surfing.

Me and the blogosphere

I spent most of the summer either working like mad on my writing and editing work or relaxing in the sunshine with my wife and kids. So I kind of neglected not just my own blog, but also everyone else's.

Now I'm back in control again, and I've at last had a chance to check what fellow bloggers have been writing during my absence. And I've found some great stuff.

First of all, remember this piece I wrote - my thoughts on blogging - as part of a blog carnival organised by Karenne Sylvester at Kalinago English? Well, the carnival happened during my absence (as carnivals always seem to), and it's really worth spending a couple of hours wading through it, following all the links, noting down the great advice. I've only skimmed the surface of the wealth of knowledge and expert support for new bloggers like me, but I'll go back to this resource again and again.

One thing I noticed on Karenne's site was that she'd reached the number one spot on OneStopBlogs. Congratulations Karenne! But when I followed the link, I was delighted to see my own humble blog in the top ten. (It was number 9 when I first checked, number 11 yesterday, and back to 10 today - not that I'm obsessed or anything). How did that happen?

(Well, now I know how it happened. My blog was mentioned twice in other blogs in the OneStopBlogs list ... both times, it turned out, on Kalinago English. Once in the carnival and once on Karenne's round-up of blogs for June.)

Anyway, I kind of liked the idea of being in the top 10, so I set off in search of more statistics. (You won't be surprised, by the way, to hear that I check the sales of the books in my series about once a week, or that when I used to sell newspapers in Berlin I kept a graph of daily sales on my wall). I found a function on Blogger that tells me which sites link to this blog, and I found well over 100! I calmed down a bit when I realised that over half of these were from Vicki Hollett's blog, which has a short cut to my own. I guess every time she updates her blog (which seems to be quite often), I get a new link.

What I like about Vicki's blog is that the entries are all nice and short, so you can go in, get your quick fix of ideas / inspiration / enlightenment and get on with the rest of your life. I'll try to follow her example ... one day. Anyway, Vicki's great story on "How it all started" (well worth a read, including the comments) led me to explore Ken Wilson's blog.

As well as his own "How it all started" story (which, like Vicki's reminded me of the horrors of my first lessons - something I'll have to write about one day), I also loved his piece on native and non-native-English-speaker teachers (NESTs and non-NESTs - great acronyms!). I've been muttering about discrimination against non-NESTs for quite a few years, including a very stressful conference panel debate where the other three panelists ganged up on me! So that's something else I plan to explore on my own blog.

Coming back to the list of sites that linked to my own, I did find one genuine article, which was inspired by my post on non-experts teaching ESP: this very interesting piece on Margaret Marks' Transblawg. (Again, I'll come back to the points she raises in a later post here.) It's well worth exploring Margaret's blog, especially if you teach legal English - scan through her posts on law here, for a taster.

Anyway, seeing Margaret's post reminded me about a message I'd posted on LinkedIn's BESIG group when I started this blog, asking for opinions on the non-expert issue. It turned out there were a couple of great responses, which I REALLY will write up on this blog very soon, so I'll resist the temptation to say more on that topic for now. (There's nothing like a wander round the blogosphere to give yourself inspiraration!)

But while I was at LinkedIn, my eye was caught by a link to Carl Dowse's blog, where he had posted a video interview of Matt Firth by Gavin Dudeney. Matt is a legal English expert, someone I've worked with directly and indirectly quite a lot over the last couple of years (e.g. Matt co-authored Introduction to International Legal English, to which I wrote the teacher's book). That interview is well worth watching, not least because he has some really good points to make about the expert / non-expert debate (which, as I've said, I'll come back to!)

While I was at Carl's blog, I noticed in his list of topics immediately beneath Matt Firth was Nik Peachey. Nik gave me an early break in my career back in 2003/4, when he gave me the chance to moderate the Language Development discussion group on SearchEnglish, one of the British Council websites that Nik used to run (and which is sadly defunct nowadays).

(It could well be, of course, that I was the only person to volunteer to moderate that group, so I suspect he didn't have to agonize for long over the decision to take me on. But that opportunity gave me the chance to discuss things with learners and teachers all over the world ... well, mostly the discussions were between the moderators themselves (who also included Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockley and Graham Stanley, if I remember correctly), because I guess the world wasn't ready for our version of Web2.0 back then ...)

Anyway, it occurred to me that Nik could help me with my search for statistics, and sure enough I found this great tutorial on using Google Analytics to monitor traffic on one of his sites. Excellent. And as a result, dear reader, I now know EVERYTHING about you, haha!

From there, I finally made it back to Kalinago English, where there's a fascinating guest piece by Gavin Dudeney on inspirational women in ELT. Now perhaps I'm imagining things, but it feels as if Gavin's been following me on my trip around the blogosphere! Paranoia aside, I decided to check out Gavin's own blog, where he's got some great ideas on the future of books, which I'll be sharing with my colleagues in the world of publishing. Interestingly, it was Gavin who gave me some excellent advice about becoming an author the first time I met him (for a few minutes). (The second time we met, again briefly, it was deep underground, and we were very hungry, but that's another story).

So what have I learnt on my first real wander round the blogosphere? Well, I've learnt why it's called the blogosphere for a start - everything's connected to something else, forming a huge web of connections. Also, it does feel like a community. The same names keep coming up, and discussions lead both to unexpected, intriguing new sites and to reassuringly familiar places like Kalingo English, which is good when all the wandering around gets too much.

So I've created my own blog roll (called "Blogs I like", in the side bar), to help me find those blogs again. Also, because I enjoyed seeing my own blog mentioned elsewhere, I thought it'd be nice to return the compliment (and perhaps help those sites stay high in the rankings). Finally, if there's anyone out there who's as lost in the blogosphere as I've been, I hope I've helped you find some great places to start exploring. Have fun!

Deadlines, deadlines ...

So much for my noble aims of writing a couple of times a week - it's now been more like five weeks that I've been neglecting this poor blog of mine. And all the time, I'm told, my interview with Lawrence Harris was badly formatted to make it unreadable. (Although on my computer it actually looked fine). Anyway, I hope that's fixed now - thanks to Karenne and Lawrence for helping me out!

The frustrating thing about being involved in publishing is that I can't tell you all the exciting things I've been busy with - it's all top secret until the new books are ready for publication. But I don't think I'll get into trouble for mentioning that my series, Cambridge English for ..., is growing. We launched the series last year with four titles, Jobhunting, Engineering, Nursing and the Media, but of course the plan is to keep adding to the series as long as there's demand for new titles. So I've been very busy working on the latest titles. Watch this space for news of the new additions, probably within a month or so.

The thing that's kept me busiest over the summer has been an online course in technical English for a university, to which I've been adding content. I'll write up a blog entry about that when I've finished my work on that course.

I also did some legal English teacher training over the summer, which I mentioned here. That was a great experience, and gave me lots of ideas for this blog ... if only I had time to write them up!

Anyway, enough complaining. Time to get on with some proper blogging!

Thoughts on blogging

This post is in reponse to a "Blogging Carnival" organised by my friend Karenne Sylvester, on the theme of "What advice would you give to a new blogger blogging in ELT". Find out more about Blogging Carnivals on Karenne's aard-winning blog, Kalinago English. You can see Karenne's eye in the 'followers' section of this blog - like the eye of Sauron in the high tower of Mordor, making sure I fulfil the mission I've been set and join in the carnival.

Today marks two whole weeks since I took the plunge, registered with Blogger and started this blog. It seems like a lot has happened since I hesitantly typed in the name of the blog, chose a design and a colour scheme, inserted pictures of my books down the side and posted my rather apologetic introduction. So what have I learnt in those two weeks?

First of all, I really enjoy blogging. As a writer, I’m much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than orally, and the idea that I can write whatever I like and some people care enough to want to read it is hugely flattering. (I also realise that many will take one look and never come back – fair enough). But that also creates a pressure I wasn’t expecting: to keep producing postings at a quality and quantity to satisfy the demands of eager readers. Very scary.

Secondly, time is a real issue. I could easily spend the whole day blogging, and still I wouldn’t get everything out of my system that I want to say. But, to borrow a phrase from Paul East when I asked for the interview, I have mountains of ‘deadline stuff’, big writing and editing jobs to do by the middle of next week (or last week, or last month). To make matters worse, some of the people who are waiting for ‘deadline stuff’ from me have started reading this blog, so I can’t use the old excuse ‘I literally didn’t get 5 minutes near the computer all weekend’.

Thirdly, it’s amazing how quickly word spreads. I thought I’d have a couple of weeks at least to build up some content and play with the blog before anyone really became aware of it. But this experience has really brought home to me the phenomenal power of social networking. On the first Tuesday, I mentioned the blog casually on Facebook. My friend Nick then gave me a tweet on Twitter, and suddenly I had followers and comments. Unbelievable. I then updated my LinkedIn page last week, and sent a simple message to the BESIG group on LinkedIn. The next day I found two messages from Yahoo! groups I belong to:

First message, 22nd June, from IATET (International Association of Technical English Trainers):

I've just just come across a new blog that I thought fellow list members might enjoy. It's by Jeremy Day, who some of you might know from CUP's ESP series. See:http://specific-english.blogspot.com/ Cheers,Vicki Hollett

Wow! Vicki has been an absolute here of mine since I started teaching in 1996, when Business Opportunities and Business Objectives formed the core of my teaching (as they would for many years to come). Vicki must have seen the message about my blog on LinkedIn.

Second message, 22nd June, from EULETA (European Legal English Teachers’ Association):

Hi. Jeremy Day has a new blog that looks to be of great interest for teachers of English for Specific Purposes: http://specific-english.blogspot.com/.

That one was from Matt Firth, another of my heroes. Matt has been involved in so many important legal English projects over the last few years that I think I’ll have to interview him very soon on this site. Matt must have seen my message on Facebook – we’ve been friends since we worked together on Introduction to International Legal English (see the image down the side of this blog).

Anyway, the point I’m making here is: don’t expect to retain any control over how word of your blog spreads, how fast and in which directions. There are probably all sorts of word-of-mouth chains going on that I’m completely unaware of. As a result of Vicki’s and Matt’s postings to IATET and EULETA, many hundreds of people have seen messages about my blog, if not the blog itself. All completely unprompted by me. Very cool but again very scary.

A fourth thing I’ve learnt – very practical for new bloggers – is to write postings in MS Word first. One reason is that it’s much easier to catch typos that way. (I keep finding typos in my earlier postings, and will probably spot some in this too as soon as it goes up, and again in four years, after the rest of the world has had a chance to laugh at my spelling mistakes!) There is a spellchecker in Blogger, but I keep forgetting to use it. But Word doesn’t even ask me – it checks automatically. (And I'll forgive my version of Word for not recognizing the words ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’ – it just shows (a) how fast things have developed and (b) how old my computer is.

A more important reason to write in word is that posts are added in the order you create them, not the order you post them. Last week I posted a long message about ‘Google News for ESP Grammar’, which I’d been working on for over a week, off and on. Unfortunately, when it appeared, it was buried down among many older postings. So after all that work, probably no-one ever saw it! So if ever I half-finish a posting again, I’ll copy it to MS Word to finish it, delete the original draft message and create a new posting with the complete article. (In fact, I’ve just realised I could still do that with my grammar story, but now I’ve posted the link, I feel less bad about it wallowing in the ‘dead old stories’ section at the bottom of the page, also known as the archive.

The fifth lesson is simply that there’s loads more I can do with this blog (like learn how to embed videos), and gradually I’ll work through Karenne’s advice on Alex Case’s blog, as well as the amazing tips on Nik Peachey’s blogs. But in fact you don’t really have to do lots of research and use all the cool techniques right at the beginning. It’s actually really easy to get started, surprisingly easy to get noticed, and amazingly easy to get hooked on blogging.

Jeremy

PS To see what I mean about being “much more comfortable expressing myself in writing than orally”, I present two links connected with this story. The first is my 10-second interview by Karenne at last year’s BESIG conference, which is where I first met Karenne and was persuaded to join Facebook and the blogosphere. Karenne has been a huge inspiration and helping hand in my first weeks as a blogger.

The second link is to the videos at the Virtual Round Table website, which is where I first met Vicki Hollett a few weeks ago, and spluttered out a rather gushing question (and still managed to dig myself into a hole by criticizing one of the teacher’s book). I recommend that you watch all the clips from the Vicki Hollett interview, not just my questions. I’ll talk more about the Virtual Round Table soon.

Welcome

Hello. Welcome to Specific English, my new blog aimed at teachers of ESP (that's English for Specific Purposes, not Extra Sensory Perception - sorry).

Here's my vision for the blog:

• I'll try to post regularly on a wide range of ESP topics, covering legal English, medical English, technical English, financial English and all the other branches of ESP. No shortage of ideas there.
• I'll also try to build a bank of simple teaching ideas based on topical news stories and the odd clip on YouTube. Mostly these will be lessons I actually create for my own students, so you'll notice rather a lot on Intellectual Property law and TV/Marketing, two areas I currently teach.
• I want to promote my series, Cambridge English for ..., but I'll try not to be too gushing in my praise, and to keep a balance between my own stuff and other people's.
• Last but not least, I hope blogging will be a good way of networking. There are lots of good people out there will very deep knowledge of various ESP areas, and I hope to learn from them, and maybe even make some friends along the way.

So there we have it, my first blog post. I've probably done it all wrong, but I feel like a real blogger now!
Jeremy