8 out of 10 BE students prefer it

The other day, a student of mine was discussing a few idioms with me.

He's an upper intermediate student, and I was advising him that he didn't need to master idioms just yet.

I suggested that native speakers tended to use idioms a fair bit, but the majority of English speakers, non-natives speakers, did not use them very frequently at all.

My student digested this information for a few seconds.

Business English: Working in the Lemon Market

Sam Levenson once remarked that we must learn from the mistakes of others because we  can't possibly live long enough to make them all ourselves.

Nowhere is this advice more pertinent than in the case of second-hand, or as Americans more tellingly describe them, used cars.

Most buyers of used cars are beset by the problem of asymmetrical information.

Unlike the seller, they don't know if the car is in good condition or not.

In all likelihood, they don't even know what 'good condition' is either.

Affordance

I was recently given an e-reader.

It was a great gift and instantly became my favourite gadget.

Suddenly, I had a portable library of 100s of books to take with me wherever I went.

I was smitten.

And because I have taken it everywhere with me, lots of other people have handled my e-reader too, mostly out of mild curiosity.

What has struck me about this is that everyone has tried to use the e-reader in the same way.

Simplicity is the Last Refuge of the Complex

NOT SO long ago, I set up a social network for my school.

I had run a single class trial the previous semester and it had been a great success.

Back then, I'd used a simple blog.

It had done the job, but it didn't really allow me to offer a full-on Web 2.0 experience.

If I wanted that, I needed to organise a proper social network with all the bells and whistles only it could provide.