Link Rundown

I've been leaving pages open on my internets for a while now, planning to write about them and not getting around to it. Sometimes cleaning my desktop takes as much time as cleaning my room.

1. Get a load of this article. It's my (Western? English? North American?) training in the five paragraph essay that makes me think this article looks like my first step of writing - the freewrite - after which I'd encourage my students to take that writing, throw away most of it, and find a main point. Brian in JND pointed this article out, and mentions that one rhetorical form in Korean writing seems to be to circle around a topic, and then deliver the main point as late in the article as possible; someone raised on thesis statements and topic sentences spends the entire time reading such an article going "give me a freaking statement of purpose already!" I'm sure it could be very effective if done well -- jokes are told that way, aren't they? -- but let's just say, either because of translation, or because of the original article, or cultural rhetorical forms, this one doesn't come of quite that well.

2. This article says that Koreans are the most materialistic country in the world. What does that mean? It means of all the countries surveyed, more Koreans said money was the main indicator of success than other factors.