Proofreading is not just about understanding grammar rules; it’s about developing a focused routine. From blog entries to novels, these 10 crucial proofreading tips will help render each piece error-free:

  • Always manually inspect spelling. A computerized spell-checker is fallible, especially when it comes to homonyms (e.g. “there” versus “their”). Manually reading an entire piece from start to finish in order to locate misspelled words is absolutely essential.
  • Print out the text. Proofreading on-screen can tire out the eyes far more quickly than proofreading a hard copy. If the text is longer than one page, print it out first.
  • Create a customized proofreading list that is particular to the writer’s habits. If the writer knows that he or she has a problem properly using particular words, for example, then he or she should specifically make sure to double-check the usage of these words in the text.
  • Always have a dictionary on hand. While a spell-checker can identify incorrectly spelled words, it does nothing for context. In the era of AutoCorrect, it’s easy to produce bizarre texts that, while spelled correctly, say nothing of value. A dictionary will enable the writer to determine if a particular word is being used correctly.
  • Proofread for one category of error at a time. If you attempt to proofread the entire document for every possible error at once, then this practically guarantees that errors will escape unnoticed. By proofreading for spelling first, then proofreading for grammar, and finally proofreading for sentence length, the proofreader will be able to perform a far more accurate job.
  • Read backward. Reading backward is an excellent way to catch spelling mistakes because it forces the proofreader to focus on individual words out of context.
  • Take breaks. Proofreading is a detail-oriented process that requires immense focus and concentration. Without an occasional rest period, proofreaders rob themselves of the ability to be able to clearly see what it is they’re working on.
  • Have reference materials on hand. While the Internet is useful for looking up the occasional grammatical question, referring to texts that have been carefully researched and vetted takes the guesswork out of proofreading. If the text is being prepared for a particular format, such as the AP style, the proofreader should have the official reference manual on hand.
  • Read the text aloud. This helps highlight cumbersome phrasing. It also allows the writer to identify any passages that may not be necessary and spot incorrect subject/verb pairings.
  • Invite a friend over. Proofreading is a collaborative process; don’t be afraid to ask for help. Having someone else read the same passages means errors are twice as likely to be spotted.

Proofreading is difficult only for those who lack discipline. Developing a routine helps ensure your success on each project.

There’s so many, many books on the market that claim to help you with your PhD – which ones are worth buying? I have been thinking about it this topic for some time, but it’s still hard to decide. So here’s a provisional top 5, based on books I use again and again in my PhD workshops:

1. The craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Greg Colomb and Joseph Williams.

I wish I owned the copyright to this one because I am sure they sell a shed load every year. Although it seems to be written for undergraduates, PhD students like it for its straight forward, unfussy style. Just about every aspect of research is covered: from considering your audience to planning and writing a paper (or thesis). The section on asking research questions is an excellent walk through of epistemology: an area many people find conceptually difficult. I find it speaks to both science and non science people, but, like all books I have encountered in the ‘self help’ PhD genre, The Craft of Research does have a bias towards ‘traditional’ forms of research practice. You creative researcher types might like to buy it anyway, if only to help you know what you are departing from.

2. How to write a better thesis by Paul Gruba and David Evans

This was the first book I ever bought on the subject, which probably accounts for my fondness for it. I have recommended it to countless students over the 6 or so years I have been Thesis Whispering, many of whom write to thank me. The appealing thing about this book is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It sticks to the mechanics of writing a basic introduction> literature review> methods> results> conclusion style thesis, but I used it to write a project based creative research thesis when I did my masters and found the advice was still valid. Oh – and the price point is not bad either. If you can only afford one book on the list I would get this one.

3. Helping Doctoral Students to write by Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson

I won an award for my thesis and this book is why. In Helping doctoral students to write Kamler and Thomson explain the concept of ‘scholarly grammar’, providing plenty of before and after examples which even the grammar disabled like myself can understand. I constantly recommend this book to students, but I find that one has to be at a certain stage in the PhD process to really hear what it has to say. I’m not sure why this is, but if you have been getting frustratingly vague feedback from your supervisors – who are unhappy but can’t quite tell you why – you probably need to read this book. It is written for social science students, so scientists might be put off by the style – but please don’t let that stop you from giving it a go. Physicists and engineers have told me they loved the book too. If you want a bit more of the conceptual basis behind the book, read this earlier post on why a thesis is a bit like an avatar.

4. The unwritten rules of PhD research by Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg

I love this book because it recognises the social complexities of doing a PhD, without ever becoming maudlin. Indeed it’s genuinely funny in parts, which makes it a pleasure to read. The authors are at their best when explaining how academia works, such as the concept of ‘sharks in the water’ (the feeding frenzy sometimes witnessed in presentations when students make a mistake and are jumped on by senior academics) and the typology of supervisors. It’s also one of the better references I have found on writing conference papers.

5. 265 trouble shooting strategies for writing non fiction Barbara Fine Clouse

This book is great because it doesn’t try to teach you how to write – you already know how to do that. What you need more is something to help you tweak your writing and improve it. This book is basically a big list of strategies you might like to try when you are stuck, or bored with the way you are writing. This book is so useful I have literally loved it to death – the spine is hopelessly broken and pages are held in by sticky tape. There are many wonderful tips in here from ‘free writing’ and ‘write it backwards’ ideas, to diagramming methods and analytical tools. Opening it at almost any page will give you an idea of something new to try.

Recently I Tweeted a link to an article called “How to write 1000 words a day for your blog” which I thought had some good productivity tips for thesis writers. @webnemesis wrote back: ” would like to see someone write a blog post on how to write 1000 words of substance for yr dissertation every day”. Of course I answered: “Challenge? Accepted!”

When I was nearing the end of my PhD, I added up the number of words I had to write and divided them by the number of days of study leave I had left. Then I freaked out and had to have a little lie down. According to my calculations I had to write 60,000 words in 3 months.

After a cup of tea (with maybe just a whiff of scotch in it) I contemplated this problem and made a PLAN, which was cobbled together from all the advice books on writing I used in my workshops with doctoral students. A case of eating my own cooking if you will. This PLAN worked for me and I share it with you here.

The PLAN works best closer to completion, when you have absorbed a lot of information about your topic and have thought about it for awhile. The basic premise is: “there is no such thing as writing, only rewriting” and that half the struggle of a thesis is to get stuff out of your head and onto the page in order to start the rewriting process.

Step one: spend less time at your desk

Now close that Facebook window and listen to Auntie Thesis Whisperer for a moment. The secret to writing at least 1000 words a day is to give yourself a limited time frame in which to do it.

What’s that I hear you say? “Are you crazy Inger??”.

Well, as I’ve said before, just because Mr or Ms Bottom is paying a trip to Chair Town it does not always follow that productive work is being done. If you give yourself the whole day to write, you will spend the whole day writing and, in the process, drive yourself bat shit crazy.

One of my supervisors once said “Doing a thesis is like mucking out a stable”. His point was that you have to tackle it one wheel barrow load of shit at a time – if you stay in the stable too long, the stink will kill you. So dedicate less than a quarter of the day to making some new text and then take a break and return later to clean it up. This sounds counter intuitive, but trust me – it works.

Step Two: remember the two hour rule

I think most people only have about two really good, creative writing hours in a day – two hours in which new ‘substantive’ ideas will make their way onto the page. Most of us are in the best frame of mind for this after breakfast and before lunch – whatever time of the day that happens to be for you. So writing new stuff should be almost the first thing you do when you sit down to your desk. Personally I find it hard to resist the siren call of the email, but if I am on deadline I do an emergency scan then close it until lunch time.

Step Four: start in the middle

When I am on deadline and need to generate words I don’t even attempt to write introductions, conclusions or important transitions. As Howard Becker in his excellent “Writing for Social Scientists” said: “How can I introduce it if I haven’t written it yet?”.This attitude is echoed in “Helping Doctoral Students to Write” , where Kamler and Thomson recommend that thesis writers think about their work in terms of ‘chunks’ rather than chapters.

A chunk can be anything up to two pages long – the text between each subheading if you like. No doubt you have some scrappy notes which you can transcribe or cut into a new file as a ‘seed’. Once you have planted the seed, just start adding on words around and over it – this builds a chunk. Don’t worry about where it fits yet – that’s a rewriting problem.

Step Four: Write as fast as you can, not as well as you can

This advice also comes from Becker, who points out that thinking happens during writing. The surest way to slow the process is to worry too much about whether your thinking is any good.So give yourself permission to write badly. If you can’t think of a word use another/equivalent/filler words: don’t slow down and start to think too much.

Do this ‘free writing’ in bursts of about 10 to 15 minutes. When you need a rest, review and fiddle with the text – maybe plant a new seed – then move on to another burst. It’s likely you will produce more than 1000 words if you do this for two hours – in fact I usually did around 3000. It’s grueling and bad for your back and shoulders, which is why the two hour time limit is important.

Step Five: leave it to rest… then re-write

Because you are writing without judgment, most of the words you generate in step four will be crap. Carving off the excess crap in the editing process will reveal the 1000 words of beautiful substantive text you are after. But take a break before you attempt this, or you wont have the necessary perspective. Go and have a coffee with a friend, walk the dog, watch some TV – whatever takes you away from your desk for a couple of hours. Then come back – maybe after dinner – and start sifting through, massaging and editing.

Be strategic about this editing – some parts will be easier than others. But do try to pull some ‘finished words’ – even if it’s only a paragraph – back into your draft each day. This gives you a sense of achievement which is important for morale.

So that’s how I wrote 60,000 words in three months. When I present this method in seminars it invariably horrifies those people who like to write line by perfect line. I’m sympathetic to the reasons people like to write that way, but it seems to me that they suffer a lot more pain than perhaps they need to. I’d love to hear your views on this and any tricks you have to share.

The Ph.D. thesis usually begins with a pithy quote, after which there will sometimes be a dedication to one’s parents, life partner, and/or pet tapir.

Following this is probably the most important part of the dissertation: the acknowledgments section. This is the only section that everyone who picks up your thesis will read. They will happen upon your dissertation in the library and flip through the first few pages, looking for a juicy acknowledgments section. This is your chance to make obscure references to secret loves, damn various faculty members with faint praise, or be very mysterious by having no acknowledgments section at all so that everyone wonders what you’re hiding.

After the awknowledments should be the various tables of contents, denoting the page numbers on which the reader may find every section, subsection, subsubsection, figure, table, appendix, footnote, and semicolon in the thesis.
Next comes the first thesis chapter, the introduction, which is judged on the basis of how far back in the past you start. Although the introduction is supposed to enable someone with no knowledge of your field to read and understand your thesis, this is an impossible goal. Instead, simply reference sources such as Rontgen (1896), Galileo (1610), Aristotle (-350), or other similarly ancient researchers. The idea to get across is that your work, being based on the work of great scientists of the past, must be truly worthwhile. Even though these works have little to do with your research, your committee isn’t going to look up the references.

After the introduction come chapters that describe what you did, where you did it, when you did it, why you did it, and how much more work has to be done before you can obtain definitive results. This last point is usually discussed in the concluding chapter.

It doesn’t take long for high school graduates to realize that they will have to go through a lot of studying to get the desired degree, but not many of them are aware of the fact that they will also need to write more academic papers than they could count. The contemporary college professors constantly increase the number of essays, term papers, research papers, case studies, and other types of papers they require.

If you learn how to write admissions essays with excellence, then you will easily take care of all other assignments you get throughout college.

All students need help when it comes to writing essays, so you should start using the following tools and resources in order to start tackling this task with less anxiety.

Resources to help you structure the paper

There are many online resources that tell you how to work on the structure of an essay, but Purdue OWL is the most valuable one. It doesn’t matter what type of academic paper you are working on or where you got stuck, you can always find the needed advice at this website.

In addition, you can also use the structure guide provided at Grammar.ccc.commnet.edu. At this website, you will see great examples of five-paragraph essays that will help you work on your own content.
Academic writing workshops that help you practice

If you are committed to the goal of learning how to write awesome essays, then you have to practice as much as possible. For that purpose, you should become a member of various online writing communities and forums, and explore the plethora of college and university portals available online. At those websites, you will find valuable advice that will help you improve your essay writing skills.

For example, the University of Leicester offers a great workshop that will help you understand how essay writing works.

Essay writing help services

If you get stuck with a certain paper and you can’t afford to miss the deadline, then it’s time to consider hiring professional assistance. NinjaEssays is the best service to use in such situation. The writer you hire will be educated and knowledgeable in the niche your topic belongs to, so you will be able to collaborate with them and learn something along the way.

You can also hire proofreading and revising services for your own papers at this website, so you’ll make sure that your grade won’t suffer because of minor mistakes.

Evaluate the quality of your essay’s content and structure

If you decide to work on your essays by yourself, then the work won’t be done when you finish writing. You have to diagnose your essay in order to see whether it’s perfect or the content needs to be improved. The Essay Writing Diagnostic guide provided by the University of Leicester is a great resource that will help you execute this phase.
Add proper references

If you don’t reference the used sources, your professor will find the entire essay superficial, no matter how great its content is. Monash University provides a great guide for essay references that will help you implement the needed citation system.

It is never time for giving up!

No matter how challenging the task of essay writing is, you can always find the right resources that will help you submit the given task on time. The Internet offers a great deal of tools, guides, and services that are at your disposal whenever you need assistance.

If you stay committed to your goal of getting the highest grades in class, nothing can stop you. All needed tools are within the reach of your hand.

Ironically, as a reader, I never used to be a fan of anthologies or personal essay collections. As a teacher, I did love showing students how to write personal essays or short memoir pieces. As an English teacher and a writing instructor, it often felt miraculous to me how a mediocre piece could be transformed in just a few short weeks through revision, how a piece could evolve from bland and cliched to raw, powerful, and beautiful. But I never liked reading short pieces in my leisure time.

It wasn’t until I started writing as a blogger and freelance writer that I started to appreciate collections of personal essays as a genre. I love seeing writers that I “know” online take different perspectives and approach topics with unique styles. As a parent, reading about other mothers’ experiences from so many different angles has helped me gain insight into myself as a mother.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal essays from three different perspectives: as a reader, as a writer, and now as an editor. I’ve been trying my hand at publishing my own pieces, and I know that it’s hard (really hard) to write a great personal essay.

After our call for submissions for My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends, to be published in September, I also spent months reading essays with an editor’s eye, trying to decide which pieces to accept and which to pass on. And that was just as hard.

And it occurred to me as a beginning editor that we editors are not often transparent about what we are looking for. I’m lucky in the sense that I taught writing and developed writing curricula for well over a decade, and all of the best practices (and unwritten rules) of memoir and essay writing are (somewhat) fresh in my mind. But most of us writers haven’t taken an English class in quite a while. And we aren’t recent MFA graduates either.

So here’s what I think — as a teacher, writer, editor, and reader — about the ingredients of a great personal essay, one that is carefully crafted to draw in a reader, make her care about a topic, and keep reading.

1. Use what you know about good fiction and storytelling. You should develop characters, settings, and plot (a sequence of events) into a story. Use sensory details and vivid description to create separate, carefully chosen scenes.

2. Combine the personal and the universal. This is your story, your life, your emotions but your writing should also express and reveal a larger meaning, a theme, a deeper truth, beyond the surface details of plot and character.

3. Find your voice. More importantly, find your unique voice that is best for each piece, or different moments of the same piece. As Kate Hopper, in the invaluable Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers, explains, voice is:

“the feel, language, tone, and syntax that makes a writer’s writing unique. In nonfiction, voice is you, but not necessarily the you sitting in front of the computer typing away. Voice can be molded by a writer to serve the subject about which she is writing.”

It might take a while to find the best voice for a piece. Is the right voice ironic, funny, anxious, playful, breathless, or solemn? We all have multiple identities and show different parts of ourselves at different times. Use that versatility in your writing.

4. Alternate focusing in and focusing out. Choose specific and compelling moments, memories, and feelings, and hone in on them, using those particular moments to help to convey theme and purpose. Pretend you are using a video camera to focus in and out, slowing down the action, like a cinematographer, very purposefully to guide the reader toward what’s important in the piece.

5. Be specific, not general. This is what I called “The Rule of the Pebble” to my students (thanks to Nancie Atwell, my writing teacher guru). It basically means don’t write about a general topic or idea; write about one particular person, place, time, object, or experience. In other words, don’t try to write about all pebbles everywhere (or “love” or “friendship” or “football” or “sunsets”). Write about this one particular pebble (or the friend that broke your heart freshman year, or the sunset that you saw last night, or memory, or place), its meaning to you, the concrete details that shape how you think about it.

6. Experiment and play. Try out different literary devices and techniques, such as similes, personification, and metaphors. Or experiment with using different sentence lengths strategically. Use repetition, of words, of lines, of phrases. Play with imagery. Many of these devices should only be used sparingly, but, used effectively, they can add surprises and richness to your writing.

7. Learn the difference between revision and editing. You must do both. It’s easy as a writer to focus on spelling errors and sentence structure, rather than making big (painful) changes to our writing. Revision means “to look again.” You do things like: make sure that your theme and purpose for writing are clear; try out different leads (ways to begin the piece); rethink your conclusion; change the organization.

In editing, a separate stage, we do things like catch run-on sentences, fix errors in punctuation or spelling, or replace overused words and expressions.

8. Read, read, read, and read some more. What all writers have in common, as far as I know, is that they’re constantly reading. They pay attention to their favorite writer’s craft and style and try them out in their own writing. They internalize the beauty and the utility of the perfect word, the perfect sentence, and the perfect metaphor.

PhD students have to do a lot of a lot of reading. One of our philosophies at the Whisperer is to ease that burden by doing some of the reading for you. We can’t read about quantum mechanics or global terrorism, but we can read books on doing a thesis. With that in mind I present our first book review.

A while back Paul Gruba, co-author of “How to write a better thesis”, recommended a book by Paul J. Silvia called“How to write a lot”. Since I respect Paul’s judgment I dutifully went to the RMIT library, borrowed it and took it back to my office. I’m sorry to say from this point its fate was similar to many books I borrow – I skimmed the first couple of pages for the key messages then put it on my TBR (to be read) stack.

As is the way of most books that end up in TBR, “How to write a lot” gathered dust until the library hassled me to return it. Yesterday, gripped with that compulsive fear of being dull that teachers sometimes get, I went to the library to seek some inspiration for my upcoming workshop “Writing – from chunks to chapters”. I grabbed the book and, mindful of my failure last time, took “How to write a lot” with me to read on the tram.

I got to page 44 by the time I reached my stop and I was hooked. My standard approach to books on writing is brutal. If they are boring and hard to read the person shouldn’t be trying to teach you to write. This one read, as they say, like butter. As an added bonus it made me laugh out loud in parts.

It was so good I assumed the author must be some old timey academic who had chosen to finally dispense his wisdom in this compact little volume. Imagine my chagrin when I looked at the publishing details and found out that the guy is 6 years younger than me. Crikey.

The takeaway message that Paul Silvia has for us in his book is that there is no such thing as academic writer’s block. He claims that, just as the people who believe in UFO abductions tend to be the ones who get abducted, only those academics who believe in writer’s block get writer’s block. As he amusingly puts it:

“Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with the big paint sprayers who repaint your basement” (pg 45)

According to Paul Silvia, the key to writing a lot is to schedule time to do it. But if I leave you with the impression that this is all there is to this book I would be selling it short. Dr Silvia is a psychologist and he makes some astute (and rather uncomfortable) observations about academic behaviour. In particular about the excuses we tell ourselves about our inability to write as much as we would like.

One of these excuses (definitely my preferred one) is that we don’t have time to write. Rubbish says Paul Silvia. The reason we don’t have time is we don’t make time by scheduling in writing along with all the other things we have to do. He accuses many academics of being ‘binge writers’ who think they will get their writing done only when they have a long stretch of time to do it. These writers may well be productive during a holiday or weekend. Dr Silvia points out this might be one of the reasons why academics can be difficult people to be married to.

Dr Silvia is a self confessed obsessive about his scheduled writing time and writes every week day from 8am to 10am. It obviously works for him because he has an impressive list of publications. My first thought on reading this was that he must not have children because that routine would be impossible for me. But maybe I am just making excuses?

I’m sure there are many of you who are like me – capable of being very productive writers if properly motivated. While finishing the last draft of my thesis I was working full time and could only write after 7:30pm when my 7 year old boy was in bed. Writing at night was pure torture after a full day of writing at work, so I made a pact that I had to do at least an hour a night. If, after an hour, I was hating it I stopped. This worked for me and I finished – quicker than I thought I would. Often all I needed was application of bottom to seat and then I could go on for a couple of hours. If not I watched TV without guilt.

Paul Silvia must be interesting to live with because he even goes as far as using SPSS spreadsheets to track his word count. He claims this gives him a sense of achievement and an ability to be able to estimate how long it will take him to do something. I susoect I wont ever reach that level of nerdiness, but I think he is onto something.

Research shows that those dieters who keep a food diary lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. Maybe one way to overcome academic binge writing is to approach your thesis weight watchers style by tracking your energy input and output?

Anyway – go and read “How to write a lot” – if you can make the time. There are many other tips to increase your productivity and a surprisingly good section on grammar.

If you want to write an essay, so writing a suitable circuit is an inevitable thing. Essay without a conclusion is like a man without an arm, unfinished and therefore not perfect. Just the end of an article contains within itself the most important information. Usually solves just the final part of all essays from either short story, discussion or interpretation of strong emotions in the reader.

Thus the final and not initiating or body part is a part of the essay, which makes the essay into something special and consummate. For this reason, one should not underestimate the final part of the essay writing ever. The students are particularly remember well, for a working class is often very short time. For this reason, the conclusion of an essay is either heavily neglected, totally, or partially omitted or it is written in haste without thinking.

For this reason, the conclusion of an essay is either heavily neglected, totally, or partially omitted or it is written in haste withoutbeconsidered.The following points to write a conclusion for an essay are also applicable to other forms such as essay Specialized text analysis, interpretation or discussion applicable.

• In your essay, you can express your personal opinion at the end of each topic.
• A look into the future would certainly be appropriate as deadline for all essays. You predict how to develop, as presented in your essay problems in the future and what impact this development would take.
• Another option for the final design for your essay would be the formulation of personal opinion. That means nothing other than that you write at the end of your own opinions on above subject. As is known, this alternative representation of the final essays of most teachers is sought.
• Also recommended is the final major arguments from the main part in the final summarize and evaluate.
• As is known, the best for last. This allows you to end your essay formulate a particular call or an important call and convey to the readers.

To focus, we need a lot of oxygen and a balanced hydration. Solve the children vigorously before your child starts with the homework. Ask him a bottle of water (no juice, no soda) on the desktop so that it is drinking enough. Our brain needs to work sugar and oxygen. Join our body can make use only simple sugars (glucose), as it is found in fruits and vegetables. Sweets and normal table sugar were harmful and detrimental to the development of concentration.

Therefore, make sure that your child if it is to focus (at school, before and during homework) do not eat sweets or drink soda. Fruit (apples, grapes, bananas, raisins) provide contrast from the brain directly utilizable sugars in sufficient quantities. Some children respond to sugar phosphates or with increased activity and concentration problems. If a child in pleasant situations cannot concentrate for a few minutes, you should seek the advice of professionals.

The eye needs to rest if we want to focus on. In this area, we distinguish ourselves from adults to children. We need order to focus our attention. Children can also have a “healthy chaos” play quietly. Make with homework that the workplace is free of distracting toys. It is not so much a visual distraction that bothers much more than the simulative nature, emanating from the many toys. The toy car, the canary or the puppet on the desk will distract a child who does not like to make homework easily.

Peace of mind

Not only the eyes and the ears, the soul needs peace and harmony. Stress and tension are not good concentration helpers. Controversy and concern in the family interfere with concentration as well as long-term failures. Apply by admonitions and punishments in addition to an increase of tension.

A child needs praise and recognition then it most when it has the least deserved! Your ranting after a bad class work is so unhelpful and not suited to your child with new energy-focused zoom does the homework.Listen to music, for example, a relaxation CD (right two times from a scientific or psychological point of view good examples) or the broadcast version of the cartridge are good ways to turn off the thoughts and learn the direction of attention.

This includes, of course, that the children this is just the music or the cassette deal and not busy with other things at the same time are.Particularly suitable is the reading. For the construction of concentration, there is hardly anything better than the children to tell stories and something to read.

In these examples, the relaxation on the direction of the auditory perception is achieved. Again, the elimination of the motor is (comfortably in bed or sit in a rocking chair) of essential importance.

There are many other ways, concentration, balance and relaxation to learn and develop the ability to concentrate in children. Which way to fit a child, the child must eventually figure it out. Parents can give their children while we demonstrate several ways to try to leave. One should always note that when adults speak of it, that is not a child can focus, they see this from the perspective of adults and over-estimate the length of time to focus children and underestimate the impact of situational influences on the ability to concentrate.

That children like to be distracted by internal and external stimuli, is completely normal. Only with age increases the ability to concentrate on working on the solution of a problem, alternating with concentration and relaxation phases today. Younger children need caregivers who help them, after this period of re-initiate a concentration phase.

You can support his child, perhaps with a short silence Exercise: The child lies down comfortably on your back and folds his hands across his stomach, and then it closes her eyes and tries to concentrate on the movements of the abdomen during breathing. Initially, for half a minute, but then you can increase the exercise up to three minutes, which you should try yourself as an adult, to understand that we are willing to his child.

The aim of the exercise is to be controlled to calm, relax and gather. Concentration is in fact not a quality that is always and at all times, but a skill that highly dependent on the situation. However, it is not only the current situation, the topic or the matter with which concerned a child affected his concentration.

The ability to direct attention to a matter depends on many conditions:

• Of the thing – If the thing interesting or rather a boring duty assignment?
• Of the current mood – If you feel well today, or you have concerns and fears?
• The skill – power work fun, can it, or is it more uncomfortable, you have this trouble?
• Of the environment – What happens around now? Isitmuch more interestingand exciting?