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Hi! I'm Christi. I'm glad you're here.

I'm an Accentologist and speech coach for non-native speakers of English. I can help you: + Increase your knowledge of how English sounds vs how it looks + Improve your professional speaking skills + Increase your confidence that you will be understood. Join me here every other week for information about speaking English and how to practice.

300th Day of Writing
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300 Days of Writing = Finished Writing My Book!

300th Day of Writing Finished! Not Finished! 322 Days This week's newsletter is a bit late because I didn't want to stop writing until I reached my real stopping point. In my last writing milestone update, I thought my 300th day would be June 28th! The website Time and Date that I use to calculate time between dates tells me that yesterday was actually my 322nd day of writing but I was so close to finishing a real complete draft at day 300 that I didn’t want to stop. I can finally say that I...

chess board

Preparing for Promotion It's Never Too Early To Start. It's Never Too Late To Start. I'm continuing with my longer descriptions of various stages of Speaking Skills Throughout Your Career. Today, I'm focusing on the reasons clients have sought speech coaching to put themselves in better positions for promotions. Competitiveness for Promotions Even people who have lived and worked in the US for many years can benefit from getting objective feedback about how they sound and come across to...

Interview Preparation Organize, Not Memorize Sometimes Less is More One of the most organized students I ever worked with was a graduate student in engineering at MIT. He came to our meeting with about three large (12x18”) papers with spreadsheets filled in with possible questions and answers. Each answer wasn’t too long, but there were enough answers, examples, stories, and STAR-method responses to fill up three large papers with tiny font. He had detailed and prepared for every possible...

Speaking Skills Throughout Your Career Doc Life I've worked with people at every level of their careers, starting with teaching undergraduates. Since I started my own private speech coaching business, the earliest I usually see people in their careers is at the graduate (master's) and post-graduate (doctoral and post-doctoral) levels of study. I can give you examples of each of the stages in the graphic above, so I'm going to start at the student level today. Amaya's Story Amaya had...

Two-Trailer Semi

August 9, 2022 Pronunciation of Suffixes with Schwa Some Suffixes Have Two Parts The most recent thing I've been writing about (for my book) has been pronunciation of prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes are additions at the beginning of a word such as "un-" in "unbelievable" and "con-" in "context." Suffixes are parts added to the end of a word. Usually suffixes have one syllable, such as the "-tion" in "animation" and the "-ly" in "friendly." Some suffixes have two syllables such as the "-able"...