No wonder (verbal) English is confusing, Part 3

Posted on July 1, 2014 by TechCommGeekMom

It seems these kinds of articles are coming out nonstop these days. While this one doesn’t have a video (awwwww), it’s short and to the point, and is another example of why spoken English can be rather confusing. We have pronunciation confusion here in the States with certain towns and such, some due to the same issue mentioned in this article from the names of towns that we took from Mother England, but also incorporating other languages like Native American, Spanish, and French just to name a few.

Read this and enjoy:

Dispatches from England: How to Sound (A Little) Less Like a Tourist When Visiting the UK

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No wonder English is confusing, Part 2

Posted on June 30, 2014 by TechCommGeekMom

As a follow-up to my fun post, “No Wonder (Verbal) English is confusing!“, here’s a follow-up that really shows how crazy it can get. Although I think in the end, there is some (okay, a lot of) Celtic actually thrown in there rather than simply English spoken with a Scottish brogue, it proves that even in the United Kingdom–other than Wales who definitely have their own language with Welsh–that English is NOT the same everywhere. Here to prove that is Karen Gillam, who played Amy Pond on Doctor Who.

Enjoy!

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Villegas Views: Digital Content is Not the Only Content Out There

Posted on June 27, 2014 by TechCommGeekMom

My latest post on the STC Notebook is up! The article is a reflection about a recent encounter I had at the STC Summit about a month ago. I’d like to hear your opinion about the question I ask at the end!

Check it out here:

Villegas Views: Digital Content is Not the Only Content Out There

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No wonder (verbal) English is confusing!

Posted on June 18, 2014 by TechCommGeekMom

I’ve been seeing a lot of videos about various accents in the English language lately, and it makes me think that I must have missed some sort of calling to be a linguist. I find it all fascinating! But in watching these two videos about how to do an American accent (from a British perspective) and hearing several UK dialects (that all sound like music to this set of American ears), it’s no wonder that between various vocabularies and actual different sounds in pronunciation that things can get confusing when trying to figure out a way to create a “standardized English”. (And this isn’t even including other dialects around the world!)

Take a listen here– Enjoy! (I’ll be working on some of my British accents. I think I have the Northern Irish/Southern Irish one down, kind of, due to mimicking family relations. 😉 )

How To Do An American Accent

One Woman, 17 British Accents

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How’d You Get That Tech Comm Job? –2014 STC Summit edition

Posted on May 23, 2014 by TechCommGeekMom

Hello all,

I’m still unpacking and unwinding from all the travel and excitement that’s been going on in the past week from Adobe Day and the 2014 STC Summit. It was a great time, and in some ways, I wish it could’ve been longer. Technical communicators are awesome people!

I was thrilled that I had a great showing of people who came to my first Summit presentation, and I got good feedback from it as well. The presentation initiated a conversation, which is what I wanted to happen, so that was good. I just posted my slides on Slideshare, but in case you are someone who attended and are reading my blog first, the slides are below as well! Since the Prezi link won’t work directly in the slides, I included the link to the Prezi section of the presentation in the appropriate slide, so you could copy and paste to it.

Enjoy!