Sometimes we think it would be nice if all English words had a single meaning, so that communication would always be clear and direct and misunderstandings avoided. On the other hand, much of the pleasure of the English language comes from playing with words, using them to paint descriptive images or simply making a joke or pun. The flexibility of the English language comes in large part from the fact that many words do have several definitions, some related and others completely different. For example, consider this sentence:

Jennifer’s regal bearing as she was bearing the box of bearings to the customer was more suited to a procession than a delivery, but that has no bearing on the complaint the customer later filed.

If you’ve lost your bearings trying to work your way through this sentence, it’s not surprising. To lose one’s bearings means to get lost, usually temporarily. In this sense, the word bearings refers to your position relative to points of reference or direction. When you take a bearing you ascertain your physical location using a compass, a map, or the geographical markers around you (or a combination of the three). This phrase is also used in a metaphorical sense; you might need to get your bearings after being shocked by news of a tragedy, or learning something that radically alters your plans.

Your bearing also means your demeanor or posture, the way you hold your body while sitting, standing, or moving. A person’s bearing can be confident and self-assured as they stand in front of their audience while giving a speech. Someone can also have a haughty bearing, perhaps showing that they are overly proud and self-important.

The word bearing is the present participle of the verb to bear, or “to carry.” You might bear a burden of guilt for something you did to hurt someone else. Women in many African tribes bear heavy jugs of water on their heads.

When speaking of machines and other mechanical devices, bearings are things that reduce friction, such as the commonly-used ball bearings. We assume that Jennifer’s regal bearing allowed her to carry the box without spilling all of the ball bearings on the floor.

Bearing can also mean relevance. A judge might dismiss a piece of evidence if it has no bearing on the case, saying that it is not pertinent to the matter at hand.

Because the words you learn may have multiple meanings, and because many of those meanings may be useful to you, it’s a good idea to do some research when you choose a word to learn to make sure you know all of its current definitions. If you disagree, re-read this post, in which we’re bearing witness to the importance of appreciating and using the many possibilities of the English language!

Online business marketing requires a comprehensive strategy if it is to have any chances of increasing sales and profits. One often overlooked aspect of business marketing is blogging, which if done strategically can boost your online presence, make your brand more relevant, and of course encourage lead generation and sales.

To be successful, business blogging needs to follow the foolproof tactics that big firms are using and which have been proven to work. Business size is truly irrelevant, as the Internet is an equally accessible tool for marketing your business online.

So what’s worth implementing and what’s no longer efficient when it comes to business blogging rules?

Offer relevant, significant insights, ideas and tools.

Don’t advertise your company or small business. No one likes a shameless advertiser. Rather, actively and substantially create content that’s meaningful and significant to your readers. Think about it. If your content is first-class, your followers won’t think twice, they will spread the word, simply because they find value in your blogging.

Become your industry’s ambassador

Rather than focusing on what you do and what you’ve achieved, it’s more worthwhile to share with your followers what your industry does and where it’s heading.

Give them access to facts, strategies, and ideas otherwise inaccessible to them. Becoming a reporter on your own niche or industry offers much more value than simply sharing one single perspective. Focus on the wider picture, give your readers a sneak peek into your industry as a whole – its trends, its new tools, the long-forsaken approaches, the promising new potentials.

By committing to providing persistently valuable content that’s sharable and valuable you ensure your blogging efforts will pay off.

Prove your value as an industry expert

There are many, many bloggers out there. To stand out, you have to establish yourself as an industry expert. This of course cannot be done overnight; it requires commitment, passion, and a plan.

What sets expert bloggers apart from the crowd is that their followers automatically turn to their blog as a resource of valuable, up-to-date content; readers know they blog about significant and tangible issues. An industry expert is a passionate professional who’s always ahead of trends, in line with current approaches, and has sound, fact-based viewpoints on their industry’s future. These are reasons why expert bloggers develop a solid, ever-increasing following.

What’s more, an industry expert shares ideas or insights bound to overhaul their industry or the way people conceptualize it. Can you be such a blogging expert?

Be part of your community of readers

Blogging is not about accentuating hierarchical differences or the consumer-business relationship.

If you advertise your product constantly, you drive your readers away; if you interact with them you increase engagement. Dial down any loud differences, don’t demand, don’t dictate. Instead, share, inquire and respond to your readership. Efficient blogging rests on the idea of you being a true part of the community you’ve created.

Encourage reader engagement

Bloggers tend to lose readers because they assume a falsely superior stance in relation to those readers. Expert bloggers, on the other hand, are the ones who creatively, persistently and strategically engage with their readers. By doing this, they tend to increase their readership and encourage follower loyalty.

Follow back your readers, comment on their reactions, share their ideas, answer their questions and overall engage with them at every level possible through your blog platform and other social media to ensure they will continue reading your blog.

Don’t just assume you know what readers want. Listen to their ever-changing needs, eavesdrop on what they’d like to read about, and provide it to them. And don’t forget to reward followers and readers with special, super-great quality content through email newsletters, exclusive free downloads, or promotions of ebooks and products  that might be of use for them.

Be unique, fresh and unconventional

Don’t just recycle others’ ideas, find new perspectives to look at things from, and stretch out your scope of issues to discover new approaches to existing ideas.

Do your share of curation; show your readers other trusted resources for valuable content similar to yours. Show your skills in critically processing different viewpoints or approaches and your ability to express a uniquely different, but equally valuable, interpretation.

But don’t forget to provide unique, fresh content regularly on your own site. This is what will establish you as an authority and the go-to blog for the latest developments in your industry or niche.

Engage with leading experts in your field

Don’t shut yourself out of the world. Doing interviews, holding mini webinars, or having giveaways for dedicated followers is a great way to strengthen the reader-blogger bond and consolidate long-term loyalty.

Invite guest bloggers to your site. It increases both blogs’ exposure to new audiences and it provides new ideas and strategies, all the while reminding your readers of your active involvement in your industry. Ask top bloggers to be featured in their blogs as a guest blogger or encourage others to do the same at yours.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments

Ever wonder why the months are named the way they are? What is it about the last month of the year that makes “December” an apt name for it? What about April and March – what are their stories?

We know for certain that for August through December, the months’ name correspond to their order of appearing in the year. September was the seventh month, October the eighth and so on, back when March was the first month of the year. However, April’s name has nothing to do to its position in the sequence.

April, the blossoming of Nature

The most prevalent theory as to how April got its name says that it goes back to the Latin word ‘aprilis’ and the verb ‘aperire,’ both of which denote an opening, to open, or blossom. This is a well-grounded hypothesis considering that April is the time when both animals and nature resume their activities after the long winter. Signaling this activity by naming the month after it seems like a sensible thing to do.

Another theory, however, says that ‘April’ got its name from the Greek goddess of Beauty and Love, Aphrodite. Again, this could be seen as an attempt to denote the beauty of this time of the year as the trees and flowers begin to blossom, showing off their radiant colors.

April is a month commonly mentioned in literary works, music and other forms of oral culture and arts. T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land opens with the line: “April is the cruellest month” and George Orwell’s 1984 novel opens with this strong image:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks  were striking thirteen.”

April Proverbs and Sayings

Cultures around the world have proverbs about the month of April that help us better understand the significance and role it had to play in their daily lives.

“March Winds and April showers bring forth May flowers”

This well-known proverb perfectly illustrates how the weather in March and April ensures the abundance of May and early summer.

This proverb signals the anticipation of spring and all the images this conjures up of blossoming flowers and buzzing nature. In many countries and especially the UK and Ireland, April has heavy rain (or ‘April showers’) due to the jet stream.  The Spanish face the same phenomenon as illustrated by their own saying which is very similar: “En abril, aguas mil.” This proverb says that during the month of April, there’s a lot of rain, ‘millions of water.’

In previous centuries when people use to forecast weather based on the weather of particular days and months, April was among the months whose weather was under scrutiny. Such forecasts include:

– After a wet April, a dry June

– Fogs in April, floods in June

– Moist April, clear June.

At the same time, the French have a saying that counsels patience. The proverb says that April is not yet the time to don your summer outfits:

-En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil.

The French caution you not to put away your winter clothes yet as cold is still a fact.

Is there a special proverb or saying in your language about April? Let us know in the comments below!

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments

Follow Ultimate Vocabulary on Facebook, Twitter and Googe+ for more tips and advice.
Check out eReflect’s Profile on Wikipedia, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Crunchbase and Training Industry as well!

The first line of Wikipedia’s own article on citations says it all: “As with any source, especially one of unknown authorship, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible.” Students, researchers, and anyone else looking for information on a topic have the responsibility to make sure they’re using the latest resources possible. Because Wikipedia is generally updated much more quickly than printed resources, you’ll probably be better off starting your search for information with the Wikipedia entry on the topic. But that’s not where you should stop, if you plan on using the information you find in a research paper you need to hand in to your science teacher, or the article you’d like to get published in an academic journal. Make sure you follow the links back to the source of that information, so that you can read what the original author wrote. There are several reasons to do this:

You’ll find more details, especially when it comes to facts and figures. The internet may be infinite, but few researchers have the time to duplicate every word and image from a 10-page article on insomnia in fruit flies into a corresponding Wikipedia entry. However, a link to that article can easily take you from the entry to the original publication, where you’ll see exactly what those researchers were working on.

You’ll find information you didn’t even know you were looking for. Even if you didn’t know about eReflect’s educational software, you’ll be directed to the company’s Wikipedia page where you can get information on speed reading, touch typing techniques, spelling tutor programs, or English vocabulary improvement.

You’ll get a new perspective and new ideas from knowledgeable people around the world. There are so many people contributing to Wikipedia that the amount of information is only limited by the time they have to add their pieces to the global research network.

You’ll be able to cite the original reference material in your own work. Many educational institutions, professional associations, and academic organizations will not allow you to list Wikipedia as a primary information source.

It’s not that Wikipedia isn’t a respectable academic source, but the editors of this worldwide reference tool remind people that it is just a source: the place where you can find links to more expanded information from the original authors, whose works you can confidently cite in your article, term paper, dissertation, or Wikipedia entry of your own.

Typesy is on different social media platform. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Googe+ for more insight tips and advice.

Check out eReflect’s Profile on Wikipedia, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Crunchbase and Training Industry as well!

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments

Not so long ago, if you wanted to look up a fact, a date, or any other piece of information on nearly any topic, you’d have to look in an encyclopedia or go to the library. Today, the contents of a thousand encyclopedias and a million libraries are instantly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Like the shelves at a bookstore, websites and other virtual resources offer a wide range of publications written by authors with an equally wide range of knowledge and skill. But while an author’s lack of writing skill might make their material harder to read, it doesn’t mean that they don’t know what they’re talking about. You might not enjoy the reading experience, but you’ll get the information you need. On the other hand, an author’s lack of knowledge on a topic means you may waste your time looking for facts that aren’t there – or worse, you may find information that is inaccurate and rely on it as true.

Printed materials are often not the best source for researchers because they go out of date so quickly. Out-of-date information is one of the main causes of inaccuracy in print publications, which is why the editors responsible for traditional reference materials like dictionaries and encyclopedias have to regularly review, refresh, and reprint the hardbound and paperback volumes that people have bought and used for generations. Unfortunately, the high cost of print publication means that these updates are only done yearly, or even less often.

Changes in science and technology cause even more inaccuracy when people have to depend on printed books. Not only are reference materials generally at least a year out of date, books published by scientists and researchers generally aren’t updated at all. It’s usually easier for the author to simply write an article containing the new or revised text and submit it to a journal or other regularly-published collection of information. That means that libraries have to subscribe to those publications and keep them up to date on their shelves, and no library can afford to have a copy of journals in every field. If you’re interested in a specific topic, you might not find what you’re looking for at a library, so you’ll have to subscribe to the printed journal yourself to stay up to date.

One reason why Wikipedia is the best source for researchers is that it’s updated regularly – people all over the world are constantly editing and adding information on topics that they know about and are interested in. They use the modern online versions of journals and publications to add new knowledge to this global database, so it’s easier to find the most current data and the results of the latest studies. Wikipedia is also a good place to start your research because it has entries for almost any topic you can think of, from the African roots of modern jazz to the best day to hold a Zoroastrian wedding. If you’re looking for information on how to improve your speed reading skills, how to eliminate typos when you’re at the keyboard, how to become a better speller, or how to increase your vocabulary, visit eReflect’s Wikipedia page for easy access to the latest in self-improvement software.

About the Author: Elizabeth Farquhar is the Content Expert for eReflect – creator of 7 Speed Reading which is currently being used by tens of thousands of happy customers in over 110 countries.

Ultimate Vocabulary is on different social media platform. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Googe+ for more insight tips and advice.

Check out eReflect’s Profile on Wikipedia, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Crunchbase and Training Industry as well!

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments