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University of California,
Santa Barbara
One of the Nation's Best |
The
University of California, Santa Barbara offers students one of the
best college educations in the country. UC Santa Barbara has a total
of five Nobel Prize winners among its faculty.
In addition to having an outstanding academic reputation, UCSB offers
its graduates excellent job prospects. Forbes ranked UCSB as the
14th best public university in the United States for getting
rich! UCSB was ranked number 59 of the Top Global Universities in an article in Newsweek magazine in 2006. And in 2008, U.S. News
& World Report ranked UCSB number 12 in its annual listing of
the Top Public National Universities in the Country. UC Santa Barbara has a 92-percent four-year success and progress
rate; that means that since the fall of 2001, 92 percent of entering
students either graduated or enrolled in a graduate program four
years later.
Here are some other facts you may not know about UC Santa Barbara:
- UCSB offers more than 100 undergraduate courses of study. Two
of its most popular majors are biology and business economics.
Economics professor Finn Kydland is another of the University's
Nobel Prize winners.
- The ratio of students to faculty is 17 to 1, and 71 percent
of undergraduate classes at UCSB have fewer than 30 students enrolled.
- Santa Barbara has many research opportunities for undergraduate
students. Students can apply for undergraduate research and creative
activities grants, a faculty research assistance program, and
internships in nanosystems science, engineering, and technology.
The university has 100 research units, centers, and institutions.
- In addition to the five Nobel Laureates on the UCSB faculty,
many other faculty members have received international awards
and are members of professional organizations. The faculty includes
23 members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 27
members of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 members of the
National Academy of Engineering, and 38 fellows of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
- UC Santa Barbara's graduate programs in physics, engineering,
chemistry, earth sciences, and English are among the top-ranked
graduate studies programs among national universities. UCSB is
home to 55 graduate programs.
- UCSB graduates appreciate their education: they donate more
money to their school than do the alumni of any other UC campus.
Next
time: Harvey Mudd
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Exasperate
vs. Exacerbate
Nat Crawford,
director of tutoring
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by
Nat Crawford
Exacerbate means to make worse:
He
exacerbated his ankle injury by running around the block.
Exasperate
means to annoy.
He exasperated his parents by his constant
complaining.
Like exacerbate, aggravate also means to worsen:
He aggravated the insult by failing to apologize.
And like exasperate, irritate means to annoy.
He irritated his parents by talking too much.
For
answers to specific writing questions, email us here.
Who knows? Your question may inspire our next article on The
Right Word.
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Learn to Edit Yourself
by Teresa Kim
Beginning writers
often suffer from a common issue: they dont know how to edit
their writing. Whats worse, they like to say things like, I dont need to learn grammar, or Why
should I learn to correct my own writing? To me, its quite baffling. It is like hearing
someone say that architects dont need to learn geometry or
to review their blueprints.
If you want to
be a good writer, youll never escape correcting your work.
Eventually, every writing instructor will admit, Writing
is twenty percent creativity and eighty percent editing. They dont say this to discourage students who havent learned
grammar. Instead, think of it in the following way: when youre
sitting paralyzed in front of a sheet of paper as blank as
your thoughts, you can remember two things. First, a rough
draft doesnt need to be perfect; no one has to see it but
yourself. Second, going back to fix your work is not a sign
of failure. All the best writers do it, all the time.
In Bird by Bird:
Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott writes,
All good
writers write [bad first drafts]. This is how they end up
with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People
tend to look at successful writers ... and think that they
sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million
dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent
they have and what a great story they have to tell ... But
this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated."
Stories of obsessive
editing surprise only inexperienced writers. Most veteran
writers can sympathize with Ernest Hemingway, who rewrote
the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times
in order to get the words right. They can even
understand Czech writer Franz Kafka, who couldnt stop perfecting
his work. Even as Kafka was dying, he wrote a letter asking
his friend to burn all of his unpublished stories, poems,
and letters.
Certainly, knowing
when to let go is necessary, especially when deadlines are
involved. For most students, however, you would benefit by
allotting time to edit your own work. Correcting yourself
will not only help you to learn grammar. As you master the
technical aspects of language, it opens up new avenues of
expression, and you will also learn to write clearer, more
organized, and more daring first drafts.
In the end, unless
you are Mozart, no one cares about first drafts, particularly
if theyre faulty. (And even Mozart thoroughly edited everything
in his head.) If an architect drew up a house without double-checking
his plans, would you agree to live in it? What if the architect
was infamous for buildings whose load-bearing walls could
not hold up their own weight? It would probably save everyone
a lot of concern if he consistently looked over his drafts.
By doing so, he would probably recognize some common errors
and learn to avoid them in future.
The same goes for
writing. It saves you time to learn your common errors now.
It is only by identifying them that you learn to avoid them
in future first drafts and to turn out terrific third
drafts (or, in Hemingways case, thirty-ninth drafts).
When it comes to
writing, dont fall for the popular notions of divine inspiration
and immaculate conceptions. When people marvel at great writing
or beautiful buildings, they are marveling at products of
major revision. Consider the sage advice of E.B. White in
The Elements of Style: Revision is no sign of weakness. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most revealing and valuable
part of the writing process.
For
answers to specific writing questions, email us here.
Who
knows? Your question may
inspire our next article on Writing
Tips.
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Joseph
Conrad
by
Steve High
Joseph
Conrad is my choice as the greatest British writer ever to
tell a story. Of course, no two people agree on such a ranking,
but take a look at the dozens of top 100 lists
at the link. His Heart of Darkness is on nearly
every one.
Remarkably, he
learned English at age 21. Certainly hes the greatest ESL
student of all time.
The California Department
of Education has a reading list for different grade levels. The Secret Sharer, is the only one of Conrads stories
on the list. There are many books worth reading on this list,
but this inexplicable neglect of Conrad tells more about the
Department of Education than about the greatest books of all
time.
A better introduction
to Conrads writings is Youth. Its a sea story
about a voyage to Bangkok. Youth introduces Charlie Marlow, the merchant marine
officer who also narrates Conrads Heart of Darkness. Marlow is based on Conrad himself, who learned English as a
British sailor.
This story is a lesson in the richness of the English language.
Its vast vocabulary is vast, and its sentence structure is masterful.
Young readers will
identify with Marlows zest for life. He remembers his younger
selfs relish of hardship and challenge:
That
time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on
the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocksand
sometimes a chance to feel your strengththat only.
Their parents
likewise will remember their own youth and the salt-sweet taste
of the memories themselves:
Our
faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions,
by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking
always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that
while it is expected is already gone--has passed unseen,
in a sigh, in a flashtogether
with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.
There are many editions,
including Kindle, audio
book,
and eBook versions. You can download a free
mp3 or a high
quality mp3 version for $8. Stan Pretty, from the Royal
Shakespeare Company and the BBC, reads it.
You can also read it on the web for free. As always, the better
the book, the cheaper it is.
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