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A sheer pleasure to have YOU as a reader of my blog. At present my main teaching area is English so you will find that most of my posts are in English -my second language of communication. I promise to publish posts related to Spanish eventually; in the meantime, those of you interested in Spanish will find some interesting links regarding my native language. Truly hope you will visit my blog now and then; will try not to disappoint you!

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GÄVLE, Sweden
I am an English/Spanish language trainer who thinks communication is a key issue in human interaction. Good sensible communication is needed whatever the language. On the personal side I strive for happiness by keeping love, respect and honesty as main ingredients. Last but not least, my smile is my trademark :O)

13 de noviembre de 2011

ELEVATOR PITCH: pitch, one of those ¨tricky¨ words to learn.

A few weeks ago, when doing an activity with my advanced students pitch, the word that has triggered this post, came up in the form of a crossword clue:
Money in brief followed by an irritation of the skin has very black results.
The answer was given straight away in the dialogue where such definition was inserted -pitch-,  but it took me a while to come up with the explanation which would associate both parties. Actually, it came right away when discussing the activity with the students. 

  • Money in brief........p(ence)
  • An irritation of the skin......itch
  • Has very black results........pitch black 
A follow-up question was what does pitch mean exactly? It's certainly one of these words that may trap a teacher in a winding explanation and still leave the student at a loss as there's nothing they like best but a straight equivalent to copy down in their notebooks. 

You're probably aware of what I mean by now if you have clicked on the word pitch and read the different answers provided by wordreference.com, both in the English definition entry and the English-Spanish one.

Pitch is one of these chamaleonlike words that has sneaked in different theme-areas of life so it gets complicated for a student of English who is constantly seeking for a straight-forward answer to their vocabulary queries.

To mention but a few, the word pitch appears in sports, a football pitch, in linguistics Pitch accent and in sales the elevator pitch

As my students hadn't heard of the elevator pitch term before and the class was about to end I encouraged them to do some research themselves. I also promised I'd come back to it in the near future. Not so sure myself how I'd introduce this in another class I thought I might as well write a post that would feature not only the latter, but also the word pitch itself. Furthermore, I find it really self-encouraging to link both my blog and my teaching.

I've selected an article from Bloomberg Business Week
The Perfect (Elevator) Pitch by Aileen Pincus 
And this YouTube video which rides you up in the hope of your grasping its basic idea: