There is something about our handwriting that reveals our character, people say. And strangely, this is not something wise of this new age of more-typing-than-writing, it is something that has been around for a while now. As I graded script after script, I discover to my horror how handwritings of students have gotten way worse compared to my days in school. There is something about the weakness of grip on the pen, the poor positioning of letters on a word, senselessness of certain curls. And it reveals a sloppy manner no other aspects of you would have been able to show.
Clarity of thought is also amply demonstrated in hand written pieces because you can no longer copy-paste or splice the stuff that you have previously written. Planning ahead and knowing what you are trying to articulate becomes immensely important. Unfortunately this art seems to have been lost through the rise of technology and its emphasis faded in pursuit of new ideals in American education.
I always wonder what is fairness and equality; is equal opportunity or equal outcomes fair? Why do we have that instinctive fairness protest while being able to tolerate some degree of what would be considered ‘unfairness’? Is meritocracy fair?
So for the guy who is disabled, is it fairer that we make sure he gets to the second level perhaps by installing a lift or do we force him to crawl/walk up the stairs just as everyone else do? True meritocracy leaves no room for charity and we must thus acknowledge the limits of applying that argument on incentives and solutions to various different problems.
Whilst speaking to a family member about her workplace, I discovered a problem their management was facing, with incentivizing the sales team. Previously, they operated on a system where everyone shared a commission based on sales generated by the team; but the new system entails charging sales to individual salespeople based on who eventually closes a retail sale with the customer at the till.
As probably expected, the result was that salespeople begin ‘snatching’ customers by bringing them to the till while their colleagues helped obtain a pair of shoes or a dress of the right size for them at the storeroom. Instead of creating additional sales, the system merely redistributed commissions across different salespersons, and in a way that is not encouraging effort.
Previous system was scrapped because there were free-riders in the sales team but the new system didn’t work very much better. Question is, how much is the firm trading off and what exactly is optimal from the perspective of the management?
I hesitated to start ‘blogging’ since I’ve got so many writing platforms but I guess I want to work on something with shorter bits of musings. Twitter seemed too concise and brief for that purpose so I opt-ed for this blog instead. So here goes.
Blogging from a nanotechnology laboratory in Illinois isn’t exactly what I envisioned for my post-ORD trip but reality often strikes us in the most awkward ways. Dressed in a white lab coat and a safety goggle, I shall share with you my holiday experience thus far:
Life was getting boring in hot and humid Singapore. I have just finished my national service in January. Most of my peers decided to find employment, before the start of their university term, to earn some money and to use their time “productively”. I use “” because productivity is a subjective term; while others may think spending their time at work and slogging their guts out for their employer is more rewarding than rotting at home, I think using this time for personal development by broadening your horizons and discovering yourself is far more valuable than being stuck at the work desk. Hence, I decided to venture overseas to move outside of my comfort zone and explore independent living in a foreign country.
My journey has brought me to many places. I admired the skyscrapers of Chicago, walked the streets of Times Square, and relaxed in the slow pace of life in Illinois. Saint Augustine once said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page”. So don’t stay at home. Go far away and immerse yourself in another culture of life. Get inspired in another environment. Lose your stress and worries in your new home. And take some time to organize your life.
I hope to come back with renewed vigor and a focused attitude on life. Won’t you say this is a better substitute than sitting at a work desk?
For the JC1 kids, you’re starting on your Project Work at the moment and probably quite confused about it. Kevin have come up with walkthrough for the subject that will take up the entire year of your time. This walkthrough is basically a simple introduction and collection of general tips for the various segments of the PW. There are plans to gather more resources to help students with this assessment by publishing a full guide on the subject.
ERPZ undergoes continuous improvements and in order to make way for more content on our site, there is a little re-organization going on this few days with the existing content. The Resource menu will now only capture all the notes that we have made available on ERPZ and the A Levels Essays are now placed under the menu heading, “Writings”, together with our book reviews.
We are expecting some articles on interview skills and writing of personal statements coming up to help students who have just received their A Levels results to work on their university and scholarship applications. These articles will be catalogued under a new page under Writings soon.
It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I’ve been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you’re looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you’ve got to work out a plan somehow.
So in this article, I’d be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It’s by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you’d like to choose. I’m writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn’t require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.
Ultimate Tool
I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there’s no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you’re going to write would be groundless anyways.
After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you’re clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn’t initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.
Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you’ve read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you’ve not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you’ve found in the beginning.
Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!
The sweltering heat these days reminds me of my old, favourite introduction: “The monstrous red ball of supreme heat hung on the light-blue sky, threatening to melt all the helpless pedestrians on the busy street with its radiating warmth“. I loved this introduction so much that I would use it for almost every primary school composition assignment irregardless of the question; after some time, my teacher became so accustomed to my writing that he could identify my composition from its first sentence. Since my teacher did not complain much, I had the false belief that my descriptive introduction reflected good writing style. Eventually, the use of adjectives became a desire to show off my rich vocabulary and that resulted in an immature writing style.
I did not realise my mistake until much later, when I entered high school. My heavily adjectival prose caught my teacher’s attention and when she could not take it any longer, she summoned me to her office. That day in her office changed my writing drastically because it was there that I understood the shortcomings of my style; instead of displaying my proficiency in the English language, the constant use of adjectives only made my writing embarrassingly ornate. In addition, my writing also suggests a lack of confidence, as if I am trying to make up for my inability by overdecorating my sentences. If every crisis is a critical crisis, every emergency an urgent emergency, and every problem a grave problem, then the whole idea of a crisis, an emergency, or a problem becomes devalued. In these situations, the adjective becomes the enemy of the noun.
That does not mean that we can do away with adjectives. Adjectives have their uses when they define and refine rather than simply emphasise. In the sentence “We are in legal trouble“, the adjective, legal, has a truly informative function. For a vigorous style, you can try replacing adjectives with colourful nouns. “The penniless man that lives in a small, filthy hut” can be replaced by “the pauper that lives in a hovel.” A “large and impressive house” can be replaced by a “mansion” and so on. You get the idea. Now, before you give in to the temptation of using flamboyant language, do remember the guiding principle of using adjectives and you will surely produce a good piece of writing!
This article was written by a guest writer on ERPZ.net and not by Kevin – its presence in this blog is merely due to the archived nature of Kevin’s blog posts from the past.
I was desperate to check the sample correlation coefficient (r) of a list of sample that forms a scatter plot. I was aware that my graphing calculator could do that but when I finished keying in the information and then applying the LinReg (a + bx) function, I realised I could only obtain the ‘a’ and the ‘b’ constants of the regression line and not the coefficient. Thanks to my JC notes, I manage to learn how to get it to work.
So just a reminder for JC kids how to allow the LinReg function display the r and r-square figures: go to Catalog>DiagnosisOn. This is probably the only time you have to go to the Catalog menu in your entire JC H2 Mathematics life.
As for those interested to explore the capabilities of your Graphing Calculator for Chemistry, you can check out the last part of my Chemistry notes.
