Editorial note
Method and use
Fifty lessons; approximately one thousand words of prose in each; 1,400 glossed items; CEFR C1–C2 throughout.
Each lesson opens with a header naming its subject and its style, so that the reader knows what kind of English is about to be entered. The passage follows. After it come twenty-two vocabulary items, defined in the sense the passage uses, and six multi-word phrases, since fluency resides in collocation far more than in single words.
1. Procedure
- Read once for the argument. Do not stop at unknown words. Afterwards ask what the writer is claiming, and on what evidence.
- Read again with the glossary. Now proceed slowly. Locate each item in the passage and observe the company it keeps.
- Identify the register aloud. The header names the style; determine what produces the effect. Sentence length? Contractions? Passive constructions? Hedging verbs such as appear, suggest, may?
- Imitate. Copy three sentences by hand, then compose your own on an unrelated subject.
- Distribute the practice. One lesson every two or three days is worth more than five in a weekend. Lesson 23 gives the evidence.
- Preserve the order. The sequence is already interleaved. Re-sorting the lessons by subject would defeat the one thing the arrangement is doing.
2. Scope
Thirty-eight of the fifty lessons are drawn from science and frontier technology: molecular biology, machine learning, robotics, materials science, energy, financial infrastructure and cryptocurrency. The remainder treat cities, language, archaeology, forensic evidence, sport, food chemistry, conservation, typography and the conduct of skilled work. These are distributed throughout rather than collected at the end, so that the reader finishes with vocabulary suited to a laboratory and to a conversation alike.
3. Exclusions
The course contains no entertainment or celebrity material, no partisan or politically inflamed argument, no adult content, and no treatment of religion or the supernatural. There is no verse and there are no song lyrics. Every passage is prose concerning the observable world, which proves to leave a great deal of room.