Improve your Academic Writing: PASSIVE PREPOSITIONAL VERBS (also great for IELTS & TOEFL!)

Learn expressions you can use to strengthen your academic essays. Whether you’re a high school student, an IELTS or TOEFL candidate, or an English language student, this lesson is guaranteed to boost your writing skills and to provide you with tools that will impress professors and make you fit in with any academic discussion. Learn passive prepositional verbs such as: be aimed at, be associated with, be based on, be regarded as, be defined as, be derived from, be divided into, be prejudiced against, and more. This is an advanced, but practical academic English writing lesson. Watch, learn, and your writing WILL improve. Once you have mastered the content, be sure to test your knowledge by completing the quiz at https://www.engvid.com/improve-your-a..., then USE the knowledge you have acquired in your daily written work.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everyone. I'm Alex. Thanks for clicking, and welcome to this academic writing lesson. So, today I will be giving you some very practical skills, practical tools, practical expressions, words, phrases that you can use in your academic writing. So, this might prove useful if you're a high school student, a university student, college student, if you are someone who is writing an IELTS exam or a TOEFL exam, or any type of academic work. So, I'm going to tell you the name... Technical name of these tools that I'm going to give you today in a bit. First, I just want to start teaching you guys, and after the first six, I'll let you know on a little secret. Okay. "Let you in on the little secret", that's the phrase.

So, first we have: "be aimed at". Let's just stay with me. Let's read the example, and you'll start noticing a pattern. So: "The advertisement was aimed at males between the ages of 18 to 34." So, here you're saying the advertisement-the ad, the promotion-was targeted at... Aimed at males between 18 to 34. So, if you aim an advertisement, this means you try to put your focus of the advertisement on a specific group of people, a specific demographic. So, you have, you know, males between the ages of 18 to 34, so this is probably a beer commercial or a video game commercial maybe.

Next, we have the expression: "to be associated with something or someone". So, if you are associated with something or someone, this means you have a connection to something or someone. So, for example: "Drinking milk is often associated with strong bones." So this is, you know, what research says or what advertisers want us to believe. This could be an argument that you're making in a paper. So: "Drinking milk is often associated with strong bones" or with having strong bones; has a connection with it.

Next: "to be based on something". Now, this is when you're using, you know, some sort of facts to establish a theory. So, "to be based on". "The study was based on 10 years of close observation." So, this means that the study, the origin of the study, the facts from 10 years, you know, that's what we used to base this study on; to do this study.

The next phrase I want you to remember is: "to be regarded as" or "to be seen as something or someone". So, example: "Albert Einstein is regarded as the premier theoretical physicist of the 20th century." So, this means people see Einstein as, you know, the premier physicist... Theoretical physicist of the 20th century. They regard him... They hold him in a high position in their minds. So, people say this. You can use this phrase to talk about not just people, but events. Okay? Like, the Olympics, World Cup, World War II. You know, what was it regarded as? What were these things seen as by people? How did people see them?

"Be defined as" - to give a definition. Right? So: "Darkness is defined as the absence of light." If you're a high school student, this type of structure is okay to use. Many teachers say: "Don't tell me Webster's Dictionary defines this as blank." But, you know, if you're a high school student, you're just learning essays. It's important to define your terms; to give definitions, so: "Darkness is defined as the absence of light." I will be using this definition in my paper.

And, finally, here: "be derived from". If something is derived from something else, it means it comes from that thing; it originates from that thing. So, for example: "Some medicines are derived from herbs." They are taken from, they come from those herbs. Okay?

Now, we've looked at six of these. What do you see that they all have in common? Okay, they all have: "be", "be", "be", "be", "be"; they all have a past participle verb: "be aimed", "be associated", "be based"; and they all have a preposition. Now, these are known as passive prepositional verbs. Okay? So, now that we've looked at the first six of passive prepositional verbs, we're going to look at another six. […]