Announcing Two Hours Increase to Our Intensive English Program (IEP)

In an effort to enhance our Intensive English Program (IEP) by providing more time to build skills, increase knowledge, and foster communication, our Academic Affairs Office has proposed to add two hours to the current Intensive English Program schedule. This restructure will increase instruction from 18 hours to 20 hours weekly with no additional tuition cost. IEP tuition is $1,383, including books. The school, faculty and staff will continuously strive to provide not only academic excellence but also the finest counseling, services and resources with individual care.

GRE Preparation Tips

GRE Preparation Tips would be mainly relevant to working professionals who want to achieve high scores, although others might also find it useful.

Some GRE Preparation Tips:

·  Managing work and GRE preparation alongside is hectic, but doable. Start of by building your vocabulary every day. Atlei  has a vocabulary flashcard app and a vocab builder app, which you can use on the go. Also, GREedge has a nice vocabulary app, WordBot, which has pictures corresponding to words, which makes word associations fun and easy to remember. Make your own lists, either in paper or in Quizlet app. Wordnik.com is a great online dictionary.

·  With vocabulary knowledge you can ace in SE and TC, but for RC you need a whole lot preparation and practice. GRE is famous for its hard passages, and I lost few points there. Not only practice RC questions, know the traps, and simultaneously build a good reading habit by reading dense content, such as The Hindu Opinions (they have a mobile app), The New Yorker, The Economist etc. Atlei blog has a great curated list of passages which they add every month.

·  Keep the evenings for Math (that is my strategy, yours may be different) as after a day of hard work you will feel groggy and sleepy so mugging up words wont be fruitful

·  For Quants, practice as many questions as you can. Do not leave out any topics, although you may leave Probability for the end as few questions come from them.

·  If you buy Atlei, try to watch the videos of Atlei according to your weak areas. Target to complete all (yes, ALL) the questions from the Atlei package (There is around 550+ math and 500+ verbal) by the end of study plan.

·  Revise, and make note of your mistakes. You will have a lot of mistakes while you attempt tests, but do not get demotivated by it. Instead, notice how you failed. Quants are prone to even the silliest of the silly mistake which will make you hit yourself! Stay calm, and notice how you failed, and create a list of your failures. Before the next mock test, read up that list.

·  For AWA’s, first read the responses from the ETS official resources of AWA, and judge how the scores are given. Then take a topic and write in timed conditions (30 mins), and review your work by someone else. I used to get them reviewed by GREedge SFA’s. Remember this base rule: for Issue, write examples supporting and disputing your position, and for Argument, “there is one plan, Attack!”

·  Take mock tests. Beginning from the penultimate week plan at least 5 full-length mock tests having one day gap in between. So you give one FLT, analyze your mistakes and study the next day and so on. You can get those FLT’s from Atlei, one free FLT from Manhattan online, and two from ETS Powerprep. GREedge gives you 4 full-length test and 20 short 1-hour tests. These mock tests are a must, as it will build up your stamina.

·  Study every day to maintain regularity. Some days you might be stuck at office late, some days you won’t feel to study. Even in those days do light prep, such as like learning new words or reading passages.

·  Do not study at all on the previous day of your test. Read Atlei tips for the test day from their blog and follow it. 

·  On the test day, have a healthy breakfast and take some energy foods for the break (I took chocolates, amazing mental boosters!). Remember, you will only get 10 minutes of break after two AWA sessions and one test section. This ten minutes effectively ends up into seven, as three minutes are gone in you signing out and signing in and being frisked! (yes, they will frisk you much more than airport standards). Reach early at the test center, and be calm and relaxed. Always remember, every question is equal, so do not waste on a question too much.

·  If you have time make a list of universities which you can apply depending on scores you might get, which will be useful to select four universities ETS lets you send scores for free, but you have to select them right after your test are over in the test center.

·  Make a plan, stick to it, and you can score easily 320+.

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Here’s what the best students do to study for the GRE

Whenever you do practice GRE problems, you should spend significantly more time reviewing each problem than you spent doing it. Many students have asked me this very reasonable question, though: “What am I supposed to actually do when I review?” Here’s the answer. This review process will help you squeeze more out of every problem you do. 

Revisit your solution.

Once you’ve finished a timed problem set, don’t check your answers immediately. Instead, revisit each problem and your own solution. Are you satisfied with your answer, and with how quickly you arrived there? If not, redo the problem, spending as much time as you need. Try solving it in different ways, until you find one that feels right.

If you still just can’t figure it out, then before you do anything else, decide what you’d need to know in order to come up with a solution. Is there a vocabulary word you can’t define? A geometry rule you can’t remember? In that case, feel free to look up the facts you need and keep trying. Are you struggling to translate the words into equations, or to identify the conclusion of the argument? Make a note of any skills you need to improve.

If you do understand the problem after a second attempt, ask yourself two questions:

1. Why did you get it wrong the first time?
2. How would you approach the problem if you saw it again? Generalize from your failure on this problem, to success on different problems you’ll see in the future.

Next, work from the right answer.  

Now it’s time to look at the official answer. Don’t read the explanation, though — just peek at the answer itself. If it fits what you’ve come up with, you can move on to the next step. If it doesn’t match, or if you didn’t come up with a satisfying solution on your own, you’ve got more work to do.

Redo the problem again, looking for a solution path that would lead you to the correct answer. If you find yourself saying “Oh, that makes sense,” you’ve taught yourself how to do that problem correctly next time! If you’re still flummoxed, read on…

Finish up with a complete solution.

This is the step where you check the official explanation for the first time. If you found a solution on your own, you’re looking for different perspectives on the problem, or clever ways to save time while solving it. If you didn’t, then read just enough of the explanation to give yourself a hint. Reading the whole explanation is a last resort — if you have to do this, the problem is probably too tough to bother with right now!

If the explanation doesn’t help you, Google the first few words of the problem. Many problems have been thoroughly discussed by instructors and students online.   

Finally, record what you’ve learned.

Take notes about GRE problems as you review them. These notes can be as simple or as elaborate as you like, but here’s what really matters:

1. Are you going to do the problem again later?
2. What can you take from this problem that would help you on other problems?

When you’re answering that second question, be as general as you can. Great takeaways are ones that tell you how to react to a specific clue in the problem: “When I see this, I’ll do this.” Suppose that you missed a two-blank Text Completion problem because you didn’t notice that the phrase “instead of” reversed the meaning of part of the sentence. Don’t just write down “look for ‘instead of'” in your notes. Instead, record a general lesson like this: “When I see a two-blank Text Completion problem, look for words and phrases that tell me whether the blanks are similar, or opposites.” You might even go on from there to brainstorm a list of those critical words and phrases. 

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12 Writing Tips for Legal English

Here at the Atlei School of English we teach a range of specialist courses in Legal English. I’ve just finished teaching English for Commercial Lawyers course, which includes writing advice and practice, plus language feedback not only from an experienced English language trainer but also from a qualified lawyer from a respected law firm. 

Here are our 12 Top Tips for writing legal English, with thanks to our visiting lawyers and course participants:

1)  As with all writing, think about your audience – writing to another lawyer will be very different to writing to a client who is a layperson.
 
2)   If you’re aiming for clarity in your writing, then the Plain English campaign has two excellent writing guides.  The A to Z of alternative words gives you the ‘plain English’ versions of more formal words.  Of course, this could also help you to formalize your English if it’s too informal.  Again, the key is knowing what’s appropriate:

The A to Z to alternative words (PDF)
More specifically, The A to Z guide to legal phrases (PDF) gives clear definitions of many English legal words and expressions.

3)  Clarity will help you to avoid ambiguity and grey areas.  A funny example of ambiguity from criminal law is the newspaper headline ‘Juvenile court to try shooting defendant’.  In legal 

English ‘try’ means ‘put on trial’, but the meaning in general English is ‘attempt’, which would mean that the court tried to shoot the defendant who was on trial! 

4)  Use layout and punctuation to clarify things, for example in a contract, number each clause and give it an underlined heading.  Use sub-clauses where necessary.

5)  Use the active voice to make it clear who should do what, such as ‘The seller shall deliver the goods’, rather than ‘the goods shall be delivered.’

6)  Be aware of words which have different meanings in general and legal English.  For example, in the sentence above, ‘The seller shall deliver the goods’, ‘shall’ means ‘must’, whereas in general English it’s used to make suggestions, such as ‘Shall we go to the pub?’
 
7)  Be careful with numbers; to avoid confusion, always write them in words as well as figures.  For instance, in English, £100.00 is one hundred pounds, not ten thousand pounds; a difference of nine thousand, nine hundred pounds!

8)  Similarly, dates should be written in words.  This date, 1/4/2015, is 1^st April 2015 in British English but 4^th January in US English.

9)  Don’t (do not) use contractions in formal legal writing.

10)  Legal English still uses a lot of formal adverbs of reference such as ‘herein’ to mean ‘in this document.’  While they can cause difficulties for the lay reader, when used correctly these adverbs help the reader to navigate the text.

11)  Get a good legal dictionary.  I recommend the Oxford Dictionary of Law

12)  Be accurate – a lawyer’s language is their tool.  Use the Spelling and Grammar tool and proofread everything!

I hope this advice is useful and whether you’re a lawyer or a layperson we’d love to hear your comments and tips on writing legal English!

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