Why are we like that???

This is an example of inspirational blog:

I am a Muslim and one of my duties is to speak the truth in the face of any body without fear. Muslims are all the time cynical about the intention of the Westerners whenever a contact between them takes place. Besides, Muslims are firmly convinced that values are absolutely absent in the West. They are willing to reject any thing that might come from the Americans or the Europeans on the account that virtues have disappeared in the west and are now replaced by nihilism, hedonism and ethical decadence. This is an extremely essentialist and mistaken view. I have been living in the US and France for sometimes and I have noticed how people are friendly and considerate to each other. I was amazed by the kindness of the college dean and president when talking to students, by the smiling faces of people I meet in the morning, by their readiness to offer the hand of help, by the patience of cars drivers, by the innocent truthfulness of their talk, by their strict keeping of appointment and promises, by their avoidance of talking on the back of other people and interfering on the others’ business, by their vivid awareness of the necessity of saving our environment, these are but few to mention. Ironically enough, the reverse of these positive traits and demeanors struck our Islamic countries though Islam has preached these same qualities since its genesis. Perhaps, there is some validity in the common saying nowadays that the sun of Islam will rise from the West this time.

Effective Blog Writing

I appreciate the way Dave talked about blogging voice. Several bloggers, who see themselves as more adept in blog writing, focus particularly on the form (grammar, spelling, layout and alignment in paragraphs). They do not know that texts are intermediated by voices. And that these voices change according to the variation of text genres. In an argumentative text, for instance, the dominant voice is an objective one, with no space for emotionality and bias. But in blogging, a more friendly interactive voice should prevail. One should, as you Dave noticed, imagine oneself in a cafe chatting with friends. For the main purpose of blogging after all is the exchange of ideas pertaining to all topics. Personally, I would adopt a conversational informal voice if I am to continue blogging outside classroom. I believe that such voice would attract the attention of diverse readers from different nationalities. As such, my blog is more likely to be enriched by various insights. In this connection, I would probably write about topics that have to do with global issues such as environmental sustainability, entrepreneurship and regional conflicts and so on and so forth.

History of English Development

Every language has its own story of origin and development. Tracing back the history of a language provides interesting insights about the history of how nations got their shapes, how they interacted with each other in various ways and how cultures were produced and evolved. In this sense, language is not only a means of communication. It is rather a strong definer of the identity of the masses.

Few people would have access to the trajectory English language has undertaken before it became the first international language. Actually, it would be difficult for anyone to believe that English emanated from a variety that was spoken by the Germanic tribes who inhabited Angeln, today’s north Germany, and spoke Englisc. However, major philologists expressed their consensus on such a fact. They claimed that three basic historical stages gave rise to the contemporary English.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain in the fifth century, the Germanic invaders gained control of England and introduced their own language. The latter is referred today as Old English. The spelling was quite different and several grammatical conventions were absent such as the lack of third person plural forms starting with Th.

After the Norman invasion around 1066, the Anglo-Norman French had a remarkable impact on Old English lexicon. The English of this medieval period is largely known as Middle English. Many inflections were dropped and thousands of French words made their way into English. In this regard, Durkin Philip suggests “one only has to flick through the etymologies of any English dictionary to get an impression of the huge amount of words entering English from French and Latin”. It goes without saying in this respect that there was only one English variety evolving and making its way to the whole country. It is indeed the variety that was used in London that received much prestige thanks to the economic and social status of London throughout the history of Britain.

London variety gained enormous recognition by the invention of printing press. The time was marked by active exploration and colonization of all spots of the world, of which America was but one instance. Once again English had to have contact with other linguistic varieties, effect changes on them and be effected by them as displayed by the increasing acquisition of new loanwords. It was also a moment of Renaissance in which Latin and some of Greek ingrained a directly permanent place in this so called Modern English. Barbara Fennell notes that since 1900 English absorbed a great number of vocabulary words and that “the majority of these words is related to science and technology, and use Greek and Latin roots.”

Looking back at these stages in the history of English, one may be amazed at the role cultures contacts and exchanges played in the crystallization of English that has become so far the Lingua Franca of the world community. Bearing in mind the conquests of England by different nations and also its being the empire in which the sun has never set as they said, English is likely to have nourished from the entire globe. That to some extent has been the case of all world languages though in various manners and through different stages. All this may give a big blow to those advocators of racial and cultural purity. There is after all no pure language, and since language is part and parcel of culture there is no pure culture. Finally, it is such fact that made the cultural dialogue as the dominant discourse in the modern era in the hope to stabilize the international political unrest.






Durkin, Philip. The history of English: Five Events that Shaped the History of English. http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/history

Fennell Barbara. Ahistory of English.http://www.ielanguages.com/enghist.html

myths about copyrights infringments

Everyone initiated in performing academic works of any sort will be seduced by the abundance of resources pertaining to his or her potential topics. Consequently, plagiarism or copyright infringments will take place and excuses or myths about the possibility of doing so will be fabricated. Personally, I was several times tempted to copy verbatim what I read from a book trying to make myself believe that that is the very idea I have in mind though unconsciously. I am sure that many people are overtaken by such myths: to come across an idea and think that you have it before in the recesses of your brain. Indeed, that is not true. What destinguishes authors from lay men is their ability to crystalize some concepts and notions that are germane to human common senses, yet difficult to realize. On such basis, coming across familiar topics does not mean by any means that you could come out with them yourself. Hence, requesting permission is a must in these cases. One should not let oneself fall in this trap.

Another myth of copyright infringment that I was not in the know of is what is called paraphrasing authors' ideas and making them look as if they are humbly personal ones. Usually, we most of the time have a tendency to plagiarize by changing the words and structures of some quotes on the assumption that our sepervisor will not remark that since the language sounds like ours. This may hold true if what we are writing will not be published for the public. We can fool one sepervisor but we can not fool the public whose intelligence can not be anticipated whatever we tried. Therefore, the safer way is to avoid plagiarism by signalling the start and end of the quote following the appropriate conventions set for this purpose. I think by respecting copyright and taking permission to reproduce written materials we will show to the readers that we are current in the the published literatures and hence gain their trust.

technology and education

Technology is touching upon all aspects of our life, especially since the launching of world wide webs. Education, which is responsible for the advance of technology in the first place, becomes more dependant on the new technological apparatuses. DVD and Multimedia are used today in schools over the world. They actually made the job of explaining abstract phenomenon and school subjects very relaxing and less demanding. Teachers in all specialities can have access to internet lessons plans and can even give homework assignment from their houses. Students now spend less time in browsing libraries that used to take days in the past. it suffice to enter a key word of your research and all books and chapters that handled that topic are between your hands. Technology also promotes distant learning and students over the world can take online classes and obtain eventually degrees without being moved to other parts of the worlds. Educational Webpages enables teachers and students over the world to communicate and exchange perspectives about their cultures and way of learning and teaching. Nowaday, there are somecomplete interactive teaching webpages and programs that take the role of the teachers. One may stay at home and receive all his courses, assignments and feedbacks in a gradually organised way. Taking all this into consideration, one can say that within the next couples of years, students will cease to go to school. That will save the governments big budgets, cause new unemployment of teachers and new jobs for educational webpage designers. The effects of technology on education within the next years or decades will be ubiquous and monumental. Therefore, everyone is required to equipe oneself with the necessary information and practices to meet this challenge.

Line 1: i am abdellah
Line 2: Who is silent most of the time and glad to help
Line 3: Who has one brother and three sisters
Line 4: Who loves life, honesty and modesty
Line 5: Who feels content, happy and soemtimes homesick
Line 6: Who needs sucess, stability and life partner
Line 7: Who gives Arabic and english courses
line 8: Who fears the unknown, failure and frustration
Line 9: Who would like to see peace all over the world
Line 10: Who shares the love of earth
Line 11: Who is a resident of Morocco
Line 12: my last name is Elboubekri