Hi Guys,

Thank you for your interest towards this blog. Today we will see how to manage the time efficiently.

If we all have 24 hours in a day, why is it that some of us feel like we have no time at all, while others seem able to balance work and leisure?

The 80/20 Rule

According to Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, 20% of what we do produces 80% of the results we see while 80% of what we do produced 20% of the results we see. If this is so, than many of us are expending a lot of energy for relatively nothing. That’s what makes time management and learning to say “no” so important to achieving quality of life.

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Thank you guys for your support. Many people asked me where to start to improve their communication. My advice is tell some story to your friends. The story can be a movie you saw yesterday or some happening in your family or your happiest moment in your life or tell about your best friend. This can dramatically improve your communication. Also in some interview they ask you these kind of questions so you can prepare for both. So today we will see how to tell a story in English.

A useful skill in English is to be able to tell a story or an anecdote. Anecdotes are short stories about something that happened to you or to someone you know.

How to start

Traditional stories often start with the phrase “Once upon a time”. However, if you are going to tell your story after someone else has already spoken, you can say something like:

That reminds me!
Funny you should say that. Did I ever tell you about…
Hearing your story reminds me of when…
Something similar happened to me….

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When invited (or ordered!) to give a presentation or a speech, most of us think that what comes out of our mouth during that 5, 10, or 45 minute delivery is the 'piece de resistence' when in fact, without proper preparation, it may be a disaster.

I liken good preparation to the 5 Ws of good investigative work, much like good journalism. Before you even prepare that speech or presentation, it is important to know who, what, where, when & why.

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There are many ways to give your opinions when speaking English. The exact English expression you use depends on how strong your opinion is.

Giving your opinion neutrally

"I think…"

"I feel that…"

"In my opinion…"

"As far as I'm concerned…"

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Thank you guys for the support on the last post how to use passive voice. I received a lot of positive e-mails for this post.

Many members told that they have problem on english while speaking. So I thought of posting today related to pronunciation.

First of all, don't worry about not having a native-English accent. It's important to be able to speak clearly, so that people can understand you. However, it's almost impossible to sound exactly like a native English speaker if you are learning English as an adult in a non-English speaking country.

However, there are many things that you can do to improve your pronunciation and your speaking skills.

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Hi Guys,  I got a lot of reply for the last post Direct and Indirect Questions in English in my e-mail. Thanks for those replies.  As I said before please leave your comment in the blog.  If you can give some more example it will be more useful for our users and now for today we will see about the passive voice. 

Compare these two English sentences:

Active = “The doctor gave me a prescription”
Passive = “I was given a prescription”

In the first sentence, the focus is on ‘the doctor’. In the second sentence, the focus is on ‘I’.

When to use the passive

To change the focus of a sentence.
In the passive sentence above, we can make the object and action (’me’ and ‘gave a prescription’) more important than the subject (’the doctor’).

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Many people e-mailed me about how to improve their communication skill. So I thought of introducing new section for them.

Check out the grammar and tenses section in the home page or click here.

If you have any other example please leave it in the blog, others could find that useful. 

Now lets get back to Direct and Indirect Questions in English.

Direct questions - yes / no questions in English.

1. He likes swimming.
2. He can swim long distances.
3. He is a good swimmer.

To make sentence 1 into a question, you need to add does. The does goes before he. (continue your reading )