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The question you raised about finding a career or a career finding you is interesting too. My own experience is that although there was an obvious career for me to follow, I tried very hard to resist it but, in the end, the career found me and won me over. You see what happened was that my father was a university lecturer and five of my brothers and sisters were teachers. And when I was young I vowed I'd never be like everyone else in my family (I did have a sister who was a vet and one who was a social worker, as well as a brother who was a nurse, so not being a teacher wasn't entirely unheard of) but I was determined to stay away from anything that seemed even vaguely educational.

After graduating, I wanted to see the world so I headed down under and travelled around Australia and then, Indonesia. At the end of my time travelling, I decided I wasn't ready to go back to Britain just yet and wanted to find a way that I could continue staying in Asia and work for a bit longer. So I decided to learn how to be an English language teacher - "Just for a year or two, OK?' I told myself. 'I'm not going to become like everyone else in my family. This isn't some kind of major life-choice, it's just a short-term thing.' Well you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and (wo)men! I started teaching, and guess what? I really liked it! 20 years later, I'm still teaching - albeit in a slightly different way to the way I started out in the classrooms of Singapore all those years ago.

Putting my teacher's hat on now and looking at the learning aspects of your blog, I thought today we'd mainly concentrate on apostrophes and ways of showing possession, as well as touching on a few prepositions and a bit of vocabulary.

Possessives
To show that something or someone belongs to somebody we often use an s and an apostrophe in English, but not always. There are three rules about showing possessives that I'd like us to look at today. Rules 1 and 2 are about using this s + apostrophe, and rule 3 is about the times when we don't use s + apostrophe

Rule 1: If the thing or person doing the possessing is singular, for regular nouns, we use apostrophe + s. In all these examples below the owners are just one person, animal or country. For example:
John's shoes
The dog's bowl
Russia's novelists

Rule 2A: If the thing or person doing the possessing is plural, for regular nouns, we use s + apostrophe. In all these examples below the owners are more than one person or animal. For example:
The sisters' houses
The horses' food

Note: It doesn't matter if the thing being possessed is singular or plural, the person or animal which is the possessor is what's important here.

Rule 2B: If the possessor is a plural irregular noun, we use apostrophe + s.
The children's toys
The women's dresses
The men's ties

Rule 3: If the possessor is an inanimate object, we tend not to use either the apostrophe + s or the s + apostrophe. Sometimes we use nothing at all and other times we use of. For example:

The computer screen
The leg of the table
The cinema entrance

rather than
The computer's screen
The table's leg
The cinema's entrance

From reading your blogs Jan, I think you overuse rule 3. Quite often when students do this it's because their native language uses a kind of rule 3 construction and/or their native language doesn't have an s + apostrophe construction. Isn't that the case with Russian?

Your homework task is to look at these sentences - some from your most recent blog, some from your earlier ones - which are all of the rule 3 construction. Your job is to decide if rule 3 is correct in each of the sentences or not. If you think rule 3 isn't right here, you should re-write the phrase or sentence using the correct possessive structure.

The second part of the homework is a bit more difficult, and it's more of a long-term project. Each time you write in English, try taking a few minutes when you've finished to re-read it with a critical grammar eye - and check for just one key grammar area. For example, look at each instance of possessives or articles and see if you're happy with your writing or if there are any errors you'd like to correct.

A mantra you'll often hear writers say is that 'writing IS re-writing'. Sounds simple enough, but actually there's a lot to it. To be a real writer means not only writing something down, but editing it, re-reading it, changing it, and re-writing it.

1. It was on the eve of the New Year 2005.
2. The secretary of our company.
3. You have to meet the expectations of the client.
4. A Russian conference of the accountants.
5. The idea and development of our team.
6. I was on a presentation of event management.
7. The sorcerer's hat become the logo of Disney Hollywood studio.
8. When I was reading, I was living among the heroes of the book.
9. In this book he describes the life of a rich young man.
10. With each of his word you begin to imagine and feel the atmosphere of his novel.

Prepositions
Here are three example of prepositions from your blog. Can you look at the underlined prepositions and correct them? Note that you might not need any preposition at all in some of them.
11. On the interview I filled in a test.
12. He couldn't believe in my results.
13. I sent my CV for the best events company in Russia.

Vocabulary
And now, here are a couple of vocabulary bits and pieces to finish off today. I'm not quite sure what you mean in a couple of places (the italics highlight the problematic parts):

1. I afford to remind you ....
2. It was a quite a tricky one with a little bit difficult verification
3. It's a kitchen of event!
4. We grooved to the inflammatory disco music!

Here are my guesses/suggestions:
1. Since you'd already introduced the topic with In my introduction I promised to tell you about my profession, there really isn't any need for any further introduction. You could drop the I afford to remind you .... entirely. In fact the phrase doesn't actually exist in English, but if you wanted to you could say something informal like, well:

In my introduction I promised to tell you about my profession. Well, in the last five years I've been working in event management.

or

Remember how I promised to tell you about my profession? I haven't forgotten. You see in the last five years I've been working in event management.

2. You might want to re-word this sentence in one of these ways:

It was quite tricky and a difficult one to verify.
or

It was quite a tricky test and a difficult one to correct.

or

It was quite tricky and difficult to score.

3. I really have no idea what you mean here, sorry! Is this perhaps a saying or expression in Russian? Can you re-phrase it another way?

4. If something is inflammatory is means it's intended or likely to cause anger or hate. We might use the word like this:

The right-wing politician made a lot of really racist remarks. Her whole speech was highly inflammatory.

Now, I'm not sure what kind of music you like to groove to, but I sincerely hope the music you like isn't inflammatory, but do let us know!

That's all for now.

All the best,

Nuala

Vocabulary
a logistical nightmare - very difficult to organise and co-ordinate
won me over - persuaded me to do something (after I had been opposed to it before)
a social worker - a person whose job it is to give advice and support to people who need it
wasn't entirely unheard of - wasn't surprising or shocking because people had known about or experienced it before
an old people's home - a place where old people live together and are looked after and cared for by paid staff
albeit - although
an inanimate object - something that isn't alive (for example, a table or a chair)
mantra - a word or sound which is believed to have a special spiritual power