George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist and journalist; among some of his most famous works are the novels 1984, Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London. He outlined six rules for better writing in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” He noted “But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.” The following rules will cover most cases: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Orwell encouraged you to ask yourself: “What image or idiom…
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Best Regards, Your Email Sign Off
Dear OITE Career Blog Readers, Writing effective and professional e-mail correspondence is an important skill to master early on in your career. The OITE has created a comprehensive guide on “How to Write Effective Professional Email” to help guide you, but there are many sections where one can go awry, including: subject line, greeting and the actual body of the email. Today though, we will focus on email closings and signature blocks. What’s in an e-mail sign-off? To many, those few final words are extremely important and tricky to get right. Your closing is often where relationships, hierarchies, and your overall tone is established and/or clarified. Here are some common…
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Equal Pay Day
Today, April 14, is 2015’s Equal Pay Day. This date (104 days into 2015) symbolizes how far into the current year in addition to the entire previous year women need to work in order to earn the same amount that men earned during the prior year. That is roughly 21 weeks of extra work for equal pay. A pay gap exists in nearly every industry — even in high-paying STEM fields, women are shortchanged. EQUAL PAY ACT OF 1963 When President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, a woman made 59 cents in comparison to the dollar a man made. Fifty-two years later, there has only been a…
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4 Powerful Questions
Are you feeling stuck? Are you looking to recharge some aspect of your career and/or life? Here are four powerful questions to ask yourself: 1. What is a chance event that you wish would happen to you? 2. What can you do now to increase the likelihood of that desirable event? 3. How would your life change if you acted? 4. How would your life change if you did nothing? To learn more about these questions, continue reading a post from the OITE Career Blog originally published in May 2010. **** Post written by: Anne Kirchgessner, LCPC, NCC, Career Counselor Feeling stuck in your current job? Not sure what your…
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MCAT Meltdown – Dealing with Test Anxiety
Testing for the new MCAT begins this month, on April 17th to be exact. Testing will go through September. You can see the full 2015 testing calendar here. If you are a registered test taker, you have undoubtedly been spending a good portion of your time studying and preparing. For many test takers, the hours spent not studying are consumed by another activity – worry. Many people experience nervousness in preparation for an exam and especially on test day. Surprisingly, moderate levels of stress can actually be helpful. In preparation for the exam, it can help motivate you to study. On test day, you can get a boost of adrenaline…
