No Job for a Woman? Mind your Language!

Question:  Is there anything wrong with the following sentences?

1. It's important for a doctor to be good at listening to his patients.
2. Sometimes a manager needs to make decisions that will be unpopular with his staff.
3. A nurse knows that she has a lot of responsibility for her patients' welfare.
4. If someone wants to become a scientist, he needs to study hard at school.

Answer:  It depends what you mean by 'wrong'.  Grammatically, they're all fine.  However, to many English-speakers, there's something just a bit... uncomfortable... about them.

Simply put: why are the doctor, the manager and the scientist automatically men, while the nurse is a woman?  Aren't women doctors too?  And men nurses?  In English it's now customary to include both genders in statements like these - it's polite, even!

Improving your Reading skills in English

A lot of students ask me how they can improve their reading skills.  They typically say that they read a lot, but it's very slow, and they just don't seem to get better at it.  Most of these students always read in the same way in English - slowly, and with a dictionary in the other hand for the words they don't know.  This is actually quite bad for your reading skills, but more on that later...

What I tell these students is that they need to practise reading in different ways, to get better at different reading skills.  In particular, they need to practise Fast Reading and Slow Reading techniques.