Tips to Write a Great Letter to the Editor

Tips to Write a Great Letter to the Editor Since the earliest days of newspaper and magazine publishing, community members  have written letters to publication  editors as a way to respond to stories theyve read. These letters could range  in topics from heartwarming human interest notes, to comments about publication design,  to the more common (and sometimes  passionate) political rants. As more and more of our publications have gone entirely online, the art of writing well-researched, well-constructed letters has dwindled. But letters to editors are still appearing in many publications, and teachers find that assigning this type of letter is useful in developing many skills. Teachers could use this exercise to encourage student participation in political discourse, or they may find this exercise valuable as a tool for developing logical  argument essays. Whether youre responding to a class requirement, or youre  motivated by a passionate point of view, you can use these guidelines to draft a letter to the editor of a newspaper or magazine. Difficulty: Hard Time Required: Three drafts What You Need Newspaper or magazineComputer/laptop or paper and penA strong point of view Writing a Letter to the Editor Select a topic or a publication. If you are writing because youve been instructed to do so in a class assignment, you should start by reading a publication that is likely to contain articles that interest you. It is a good idea to read your local newspaper to look for local and current events that matter to you. You may also choose to look at magazines that contain articles that interest you. Fashion magazines, science magazines, and entertainment publications all contain letters from readers.Read the instructions provided. Most publications provide guidelines for letters to the editor. Look over the first few pages of your publication for a set of suggestions and guidelines and follow them carefully.Include your name, address, email address, and phone number at the top of your letter. Editors often require this information because they will need to verify your identity. You can state that this information is not to be published. If you are responding to an article or letter, say so right away. Name the article in the first sentence of the body of your letter. Be concise and focused. Write your letter in pithy, clever statements, but remember that this is not easy to do! You will probably need to write several drafts of your letter to condense your message.Limit your writing to two or three paragraphs. Try sticking to the following format:In your first paragraph, introduce your problem and sum up your objection.In the second paragraph, include a few sentences to support your view.End with a great summary and a clever, punchy line.Proofread. Editors will ignore letters that contain bad grammar and poorly-written rants.Submit your letter by email if the publication allows it. This format enables the editor to cut and paste. Tips If youre responding to an article youve read, be prompt. Dont wait or your topic will be old news.Remember that the more popular and widely-read publications receive hundreds of letters. You have a better chance of getting your letter published in a smaller publication.If you dont want your name to be published, state so clearly. You can put any direction or request like this in a separate paragraph. For example, you can simply put Please note: I do not want my full name to be published with this letter. If you are a minor, inform the editor of this as well.Since your letter may be edited, you should get to the point early. Dont bury your point inside a lengthy argument. Dont appear to be overly emotional. You can avoid this by limiting your exclamation points. Also, avoid insulting language.Remember that short, concise letters sound confident. Long, wordy letters give the impression that youre trying too hard to make a point.

American Black Bear

American black bear is the smallest but most common bear seed in North America. People tend to think that bears are extremely dangerous, especially for humans. In fact, the bear is a harmless creature and has a very kind attitude. Compared to all other kinds of bears, the American black bear is in the middle of the size. It is smaller than Polar bear but bigger than lazy bear. Asian black bears differ in size depending on their position in the world, gender, the amount of food available, the timing, and their genetics. The ancestors of American black bear and Asian black bear are separated from Sun Bear 4.58 mya. Then American black bear was separated from Asian black bear 4.08 mya. The fossil of the early American black bear was in the port of Kennedy, Pennsylvania, very similar to Asian seeds, but later specimens grew to the size of Grizzlies. From the Holocene to the present, the size of American black bear seems to shrink, but it is controversial for these fossil sample age. Cons istent with phylogenetic contradiction and D statistics, the DFOIL statistics found a gene flow between the ancestors of American black bear / brown bear / polar bear cactus and Asian black bears (FIG. 4, Table 1). Euroria bear overlaps with other bear species geographically and is widely distributed like Asian black bear. It was found in the fossil layer of 2.5 Ma - 1.0 Ma1, 31 in Europe. The broad geographical distribution will explain the almost equally strong gene flow from Asian black bear seen in D statistics to Brown bear (Supplementary Figure 14). Finally, there is a gene flow signal between America and Asian black bear. Gene flow can occur on the US side or Asian side of the Bering Strait, consistent with intra-species mitochondrial capture 2 (Figure 3). Most of weak gene flow signals are shown in Figure 1.

The Basic Universal Laws Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Basic Universal Laws - Essay Example Going to the grocery store or paying for gas can be a difficult task if a person is not entirely fluent in the language.   Attempting to learn new ideas, such as when I began high school in the US, can b,e seemingly impossible at first.   Struggling with concepts that a person knows because of language can be an incredibly trying and frustrating task.   Relearning various aspects of mathematics and chemistry, only in English this time, made me wish I hadn’t moved to the US at times.   The only choice that I had was to persevere and continue making progress little by little. Beyond language, there were many cultural practices that I had to acclimate myself to.   When you grow up in a culture, you simply learn these small customs.   Foreign language classes might attempt to prepare students for various aspects of these cultural differences, though they can in no way totally prepare students for the vast differences in cultures such what exists between Chinese and Ame rican cultures.   There were many times in which I was positive I was using my English language skills appropriately, but because of cultural differences, I was being understood improperly.   These times could be even more frustrating than a simple language barrier.   Often times these episodes could even be embarrassing, though I was able to pretend that I either hadn’t picked up on that aspect of the exchange or simply ignored it.   Unless people have experienced events such as these themselves, they are simply incapable of truly understanding the difficulties of cultural differences.  I did have support from my family.   They helped me with the phrases and concepts that I was having difficulty comprehending.   Eventually, I was able to help my family members with various words and concepts that I was learning and utilizing on my own.   I do know that I would not have been able to adjust to my new life in the US if it had not been for the comfort of having m y family with me.   The external force of my immigration to the US forced many changes upon me, but it did not completely take away everything that I had previously known in my life before.

Four questions - short essay style Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Four questions - short style - Essay Example IMC is meant to maintain a proper and coherent communication relation as one of the most important basic principles of IMC is to ensure ‘consistency’ in messages being communicated. IMC is not only a careful coordination of some or all promotional messages such as personal selling, advertisement, sales promotion, sponsorship etc, but also a very strategic tool to ensure consistency in each and every contacts between the firm its stakeholders including management, employees and customers. As some literatures noted, IMC’s philosophy advocates that there should be a proper coordination in messaging so as to ensure that IMC facilitate multiple messaging with a single voice (Shimp, 2008). Marketing communication is a process of exchanging facts, ideas, opinions, emotions etc about the brand or the firm that are important for the marketer to impact customers’ behaviour and attitudes. An important principle of IMC suggests that marketing communication should not only influence customers’ awareness about brand, but also should encourage them to respond to the desired action. If IMC’s specific goal is to improve word-of-mouth, the messages should be able to affect customers’ positive talk about the brand. Assessing what present and future customers want and need and what can satisfy them is a critically important requirement in marketing. A firm is not supposed to offer to its customers a product or service that it simply wants to produce or provide, but rather, it should see what its customers want now and in future and then to design and develop products or services accordingly. Marketing orientation is a process of organization-wide generation of market intelligence pertaining to current and future customers’ needs and wants. There are basically three dimensions in marketing orientation- They are:- For example, the marketer of a computer manufacturing firm needs to foresee

Teaching Philosophy Statement Essay -- Philosophy of Teaching Educatio

Teaching Philosophy Statement Teaching is a profession which allows one to influence many lives. It is because of this opportunity to touch lives that I have decided to enter the teaching profession. I understand that the benefits of this profession are mostly intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic, yet the thought of inspiring students to learn drives me closer to the teaching profession. Monetary gain from a certain profession is minimal compared to the feeling that at the end of the day you have touched someone’s life. To summarize, the reason that I am entering the teaching profession, is my conviction to touch lives. Full of life and well lit will be two ways of describing my classroom. Nothing is more depressing than working in a dimly lit room. I hope to fill the walls with a few bulletin boards and yet not make the room look crowded and cluttered. The clock will be placed at the front of the room so the students will be able to pace themselves and see it clearly. I will seat in a traditional manor but allow the students to sit were they like. Once in the classroom, I feel my teaching style will lean toward that of a traditionalist. If one was to ask any college instructor in America to compare the high school graduate of today with the graduate of twenty years ago, they would almost always reply, â€Å" The student twenty years ago was more equipped for college than the student of today.† Upon further exploration, I found that many college level math courses were taught in the eighth and ninth grades in the early seventies. What does this have to do with me being a traditionalist you ask? America has left behind many of the great principles of education which made this nation great. In general ... ...d of imparting that knowledge to others. When my student walks out of my classroom I pray that I change the way they view the world. My goal would be that each one feels my desire to enlighten them academically. Knowing that there are thousands of teachers out there doing there best in the struggle to educate, I still feel the urge to out and be the best I can be. Many of the old timers say, â€Å"Just wait until you get in the classroom with a bunch of thirteen year olds cussing and carrying on and whose parents don’t give a @!$#% and then we’ll see what’ll happen.† My reply to this is simply, â€Å"We’ll see, we’ll see.† So in every seminar I will attend or in every staff meeting I am part of, I will be a continual learner. I will be faithful and do what I love.Teach! Teaching with fire! Teaching with passion! Teaching with compassion! I want to be a teacher.

When It All Began

When I began kindergarten I was able to print my name in large letters. But the school was teaching me to write from scratch. I was put into advanced writing because the school linked writing to reading, and I was an advanced reader. I was not an advanced writer. At that age, I lacked the small-muscle control for precise penmanship, and I usually found my writing lessons an unpleasant, frustrating struggle. I squeaked through without being singled out as a poor student, but I began to dislike and feel anxious about writing. In my first and last week of first grade, I learned what it meant to fall behind. We were no longer in reading and writing groups. Before recess one day, everyone in class was assigned to write their name ten times. With my usual care and diligence, I began to work. When it was time for recess, I was the only student who hadn’t finished. Doing a half-ass job just to be done on time had never occurred to me. In my six-year-old view of life, doing something meant doing it as best as I could, there were no other options. Seeing my unfinished work, my teacher jumped to the worse conclusion. While the other kids went out for brief chance to play, she and her aide kept me inside for a lecture on how I needed to work harder. They assumed I had no finished because I had not tried, and when I told them I couldn’t work faster, the ignored this as if it must be a lie. As so often happens to student in schools, I was presumed to be lazy, dishonest, and driven by the worst intentions. At age six, all I understood from my teacher’s lecture was that I had done very badly on my assignment and should have been able to do much better. She and her aide even made me promise that I would finish all my future assignments on time, a promise that, as I told them and they wouldn’t believe, I didn’t think I could keep. Their intense disapproval and this need to make false promise upset me deeply, and made me doubt my own abilities in a way that I never had before. If they were so certain that only lazy people write as badly as I did, yet I knew I wasn’t lazy, I could only conclude something was wrong with me. It must be that I’m no good at writing. And since my deficiency had earned me such disapproval, I was ashamed of it. My parents took me out of school that week, but my belief that I was a bad writer lasted for years after my last school day. I was afraid to write because I was sure I would fail. With most of what I did, I had no concept of failure, only of needing to improve or try again or take a different approach. Being out of school, with its flexibility and lack of external judgments, rarely involves failure. Someone out of school who doesn’t understand a math concept has no more failed than a baby who falls down while trying to walk, she simply hasn’t learned it yet. As my family began homeschooling, writing was the only subject I wanted to avoid. Through my school lessons and failure had only been with penmanship, I also feared composition, it was all writing, and I had developed a mental block against anything under that name. My mother worried, she could see that all other aspects of homeschooling were going smoothly, but what about this one important life skill that I hated and feared. Believing that she had to keep me from falling behind, she tried making me do writing assignments. She didn’t give them to me often, for they were miserable ordeals for the both of us. But every few months or so she would start worrying that she wasn’t teaching her daughter to write, and would try giving me an assignment or a series of them. Sometimes she tried to find ways to make writing fun. She had me practice penmanship by writing favorite phrases in pretty colors. She asked me to write short stories twice, I never finished either one, and fo r a while she had me keep a journal. None of it worked. Even the fun assignments were only fun for a few minutes, then the fun wore off and fear, frustration, and resentment took over. When I did other projects, I was enthusiastic and full of ideas, but whenever I had to write, I became listless, uninspired, and uncreative. I brought nothing to the assignment, she had to lead me, or drag me all the way because I was only working toward her expectations, not my own ideas. I wrote badly. I could tell how poor my work was, which reinforced my belief that I couldn’t write. My style and content were unrelentingly dull and generic. I was too afraid of writing to be able to put my imagination or my identity into it. I did not progress. To progress, one has to analyze what one is doing and look for ways to improve, and I was frozen in the glare of my knowledge that I was a bad writer. Since every writing assignment only made matters worse, my mother tried the only other possibility. She allowed me no to write, she neglected the subject. She let me fall behind a grade level. She removed the pressure and gave me a chance to outgrow and forget my fear. Except for thank-you notes, I wrote nothing at all. When I was almost twelve, after some years of no writing, Mom again suggested that I try keeping a journal. Unlike the previous journal, which had been an assignment for educational purposes, she made it clear that this one was entirely my decision and that writing skills wouldn’t be an issue. If I wanted to do it at all, I would be free to scribble any old illegible and incomprehensible mess I chose. Furthermore, she wouldn’t expect to see any more of it than I felt like showing her, a few years earlier, I wouldn’t even had consider taking such a suggestion without being pushed into it, but my time away from the dreaded subject had taken the edge off of my fear. I was intrigued by the idea of keeping a record of my life that I could look back on later. This idea was safe enough, with its complete lack of outside pressure and no need to even think about whether my writing was correct, that I felt comfortable giving it a try. I wrote in my journal daily, enjoyed it, and put no effort at all into the quality of my writing. Nearly the whole journal consists of two kinds of sentences, the short, simple kind I had use in my assigned writing, and long monotonous run-ons that I had never used before. The run-ons, some of which went on for pages, came from my completely ignoring the technical side of writing and, for the first time in my life, simply rambling unselfconsciously. Then I decided to write a book. I had been keeping the journal for a year when I had the idea. My inspiration was TV, light reading, and daydreams. For the first time in my life, I was planning a serious writing project that I eagerly wanted to work on. It arose from my own ideas and interest, which was on overwhelmingly important aspect that has to occur at its own moment. Giving children assignments tied to their interests is a poor substitute for letting them follow those interests into whatever learning comes naturally. My mom had tried giving me writing assignments on things that interested me. But being interested in the subject doesn’t mean I want to write about them, so such attempts to tie assignments to interests are often ineffective. When I started writing, I worked slowly, carefully, and well. No one minded, no one checked up on me to see what I was accomplishing. My parents showed friendly interest, as they would if I had a new toy or a new playmate, but they never expressed interest. Motivated wholly by desire to express my ideas, I was energetic and creative. Instead of captive forced to struggle with a hated duty, I became an artist at work, passionate, inspired, striving toward an ideal that had come from my own thoughts. At last I opened my mind and let myself be influenced by all the good writing I had seen. I had, after all, been reading profusely for nearly my whole life. All those years, I had seen and enjoyed good writing again and again yet never imitated it. Now with me writing my book, I considered style for the first time and followed the examples of the authors I had read. As I gathered my observations together and used them without fear, I gained my first solid evidence that I had been wrong for seven years, I could write. I worked on my book on and off for several months before I got absorbed in other things and lost interest. When I wrote, I was very slow, because, with my lack of experience, it took a long time to do the sophisticated work I wanted to do. In the end, I only wrote a total of three pages. But however little I had put down on paper, I had learned a tremendous amount and found confidence in my ability to write. After abandoning the book, I did not write seriously for the next three years or even continue with the journal. This was very different from my old no writing days, though, I was only uninterested, not afraid. Writing a thank-you note or an occasional letter to Grandma was now pleasant and non-threatening. I wasn’t writing compositions every week, but who cares. I had already gained as much as a student needs to, adequate writing skills, confidence in my ability, and knowledge that I would be able to learn more about writing anytime I chose. At age sixteen, at an outdoor concert, I picked up a political flier urging people to write to Congress in opposition to welfare. I felt strongly about this issue and wanted to influence the outcome, so I quickly decided to write. I let ideas for what to say in the letter float through my mind for a couple of days. I was writing because I had an idea that I wanted to express, and again, I drew on my reading experience as I attempted to express myself well. This time I used the writing style I had seen in the political commentary pieces I read in the magazines and newspapers. With that letter, I found that I loved the process of writing. I developed a passion for putting words together to express my thoughts and feelings, and I been writing ever since. After the welfare letter, I began to write profusely on a variety of topics. I was starting fresh, seeing my college writing assignments simply as what they were, a set of requirements that I voluntarily agreed to so I could get help with my work, instead of linking them to my grade-school nightmare.

Key Events That Have Happened Within The Uk And The...

Introduction In this report it will highlight the key events that have happened within the UK and the international Financial Market during the week starting from 2nd to 8th February 2015. This include main event in the stock market, the developments in foreign exchange markets as well as interest rate and major news in the banking sector. World stock Market Market movements S P 500 / US equities This week Energy stocks led the higher in volatile trading conditions on Wall Street as equity bulls sought to put a miserable January behind. There have been further gains for crude oil prices and better optimism that hopefully Greece will reach deal to resolve its debt stand-off help the SP 500 to rise sharply for a second day. New that†¦show more content†¦The energy sector supported the FSTE 100 with further help by having a 4.5 per cent rise in BT after it finalised the  £12.5bn charge of mobile group EE. The FSTE 100 has down from a five-month high with the help of the losses for gold mining stocks as the price of metal fell in the wake of a robust. Eurofirst 300 / European equities Spanish stocks has political concerns of worries of the anti-austerity Podemos party as there are drawing strength from policies of the new Greek government. The Eurofirst 300 rose back towards seven-year high and Greek stocks leapt 11.3 per cent as a new government softened its stance towards Athens creditors. Also during this week LVMH has an 8.1 per cent rise on the news of a rise in fourth quarter sales which help lift the luxury goods sector, while Greek banking stocks had another positive session. The Greek banks came under heavy selling pressure after the European Central Bank tightened their access to cheap funding, helping drive the Athens market down 3.4 per cent. The current affairs over the uncertainties over Greece have leaded the Eurofirst 300 to end at a seven-year high. With the concern about the US economy and a new rise in oil prices. Nikkei 225 / Japanese equities Tokyo market have been undermining with the help of reports of worries over global growth prospects and disappointing national