You shake someone’s hand, they tell you their name, and about four seconds later it’s completely gone. It’s one of the most common small panics in any conversation. And it usually has nothing to do with rudeness or a poor memory. In the moment you’re introduced, most of your attention goes to the handshake, the…
Caption writing is the craft of writing the short text that sits under or beside a photo, post, or figure. A good caption does one job clearly: it either explains what the reader is looking at, adds context the image cannot show, or gives the image a voice for social media. The rules differ by…
SH and CH minimal pairs are word pairs that differ by only one sound: the “sh” /ʃ/ in one word and the “ch” /tʃ/ in the other, with everything else the same. “Ship” and “chip,” “share” and “chair,” “watch” and “wash” are minimal pairs. They are used in speech therapy and phonics to train the…
S and z minimal pairs are word pairs that differ by only one sound: the /s/ in one word and the /z/ in the other, with everything else the same. “Sip” and “zip,” “bus” and “buzz,” “price” and “prize” are minimal pairs. They are used in speech therapy and phonics to train the ear and…
To quote a textbook in APA 7, put the quoted words in quotation marks and add an in-text citation with the author’s last name, the year, and the page number: (Rokach, 2005, p. 477). A textbook is cited exactly like any other book in APA, the fact that it is a textbook does not change…
For many travelers, Japan begins beneath the electric glow of Tokyo’s skyscrapers and concludes among Kyoto’s celebrated temples and bamboo groves. These places are magnificent, and rightly so. Yet they can also create the comforting illusion that Japan is something to be admired from a carefully curated itinerary—a country of famous landmarks, efficient trains, and…
K and T minimal pairs are words that differ by only the /k/ and /t/ sounds, like key and tea or cap and tap. They are used in speech therapy to correct fronting, the pattern where a child replaces the back sound /k/ with the front sound /t/, so cat becomes tat and coat becomes…
To quote a source with more than one author, name the authors in your in-text citation the same way you would a single author, but follow each style’s rule for how many names to list. For two authors, both styles name both every time: MLA writes (Smith and Jones 14), APA writes (Smith & Jones,…
TH and F minimal pairs are word pairs that differ only in the “th” and “f” sounds, like thin and fin or deaf and death. They are used in speech therapy to correct a common error in which a child substitutes “f” for “th” (saying “fumb” for “thumb”). Hearing and producing the two words side…
A caption is a nonfiction text feature: a short line of text near a photo or illustration that explains what the image shows. It usually sits directly below the picture, though it can appear above or beside it. Captions matter because they often carry information that is not in the main text, so a reader…