Warm-Up 2

Warm-Up 2 is all about complaining. 'The Hire Car from Hell' is all about really bad treatment when renting a car in the USA. The idea for this Warm-Up came from the wonderful film,"Trains and Planes and Automobiles", with Steve Martin and John Candy. The task is set up so that you don't have any other option than to write a well-composed letter to the company in the USA - and hope for the best. The sum of money involved is too small to make it worth your while starting a legal action (at least from this side of the Atlantic - it'd be different if you were living in the USA, where they have Small Claims Courts). There's also a lot of scope for 'he said-she said' situations (which is how they describe situations where one person says one thing, and the other person says something different in American English).

The task itself is quite limited: you only have to write FIVE sentences from the letter you'd write (i.e. NOT the entire letter). The point is to see whether you can calibrate your language, so that you express yourself firmly, but refrain from insults and gratuitous comments that will just result in your letter being filed in the trash can! Once again, there's a link to the Send-In Task which comes next.

You submit your Warm-Up Task 2 by copying your text into a comment. Remember to includeFIVE sentences only - and to include your name in the submission.

By the way, if you don't know what the 'redeye' is, take a look at the first comment on this post.

Feedback on Warm-Up 1

Here are some general comments about how people tackled Warm-Up 1.

Firstly, well done! The standard of your Warm-Up tasks was very high indeed. Most people got the mix of professional and personal information right, realising that one of the most important functions of presentations like these is to make the company look good for hiring you.

There were a few persistent language errors too, though, and it's these I want to take a look at now. Most of them are fairly trivial … but the problem is that people judge you very harshly for trivial errors in your written English - they take them as evidence of sloppy thinking and behaviour in other areas too, unfortunately.

Capital Letters

There's an exercise on capital letters in Module 1. The commonest errors are:

• failing to capitalise the names of academic subjects ("She used psychology on her Psychology Professor to get her to allow her to submit her essay late" - the first 'psychology' is what we usually refer to as the way the mind works, whilst the second 'Psychology' is an academic subject).

• failing to capitalise all the information words in titles. 'Information words' are … well, words which give information. Thus in the title 'Head of Purchasing Department', three of the words convey essential information, but 'of' is a "grammar word", which is there just to make the grammar of the phrase hang together. Typically in Swedish, you capitalise the first word of a title, but not the rest.

Verbs in Phase

OK, sorry for using a bit of grammatical metalanguage!

When you have two verbs together, or a verb form that comes after another phrase, it causes problems for people in English! Are you going to write the second verb as "see", "to see", "seeing" or "seen"? Or perhaps you're going to bring in a new clause like "… that you see".

There are patterns, rather than rules in English, and they tend to apply to specific verbs, which makes it difficult for you to know in advance which form to use. In general, though, the infinitive form ('to see') indicates some kind of consequence, whilst the -ing form indicates some kind of incidental, on-going action, like this:

• He opened the door to let the cat out (that's why he opened the door)
• He opened the door letting the cat out (that wasn't why - it's just that the cat took its chance to sneak out whilst the door was open!)

A good grammar book (like the Collins CoBuild Grammar) will give you the chapter and verse on verbs in phase.

Commas

Getting the commas right is sometimes quite important, since they indicate which bit of the sentence goes with which. There are two common errors to avoid:

• breaking the link between the subject and the main verb unnecessarily (like this: *Fredrik Reinfeldt in his speech on Monday, criticised the opposition*)
• missing the second comma in 'apposition' (like this: *Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Prime Minister of Sweden criticised the opposition* - this time you need a second comma between 'Sweden' and 'criticised', because 'the Prime Minister of Sweden' is an entire phrase which means the same as 'Fredrik Reinfeldt' - that's what 'apposition' is)

Since … and the perfect tenses

Verb tenses in English nearly all tell you something about when something happened. Then we have other words which are used in conjunction with some kind of time phrase too. 'Since', for example, links two points in time (e.g. 'Since 1991' and now, as in "David has taught at university in Sweden since 1991"). 'For', on the other hand, talks about periods of time ("David has taught at university in Sweden for twenty years"). When you link two points in time, you nearly always use a perfect tense (one of those with have/had/will have in it).

If you have any questions about any of these points, please don't hesitate to ask!

Some Advice about Send-In Task 1

Bruce Harper, the Internet Tutor in Australia, has given some very useful advice about how to write good Send-In Tasks 1 in a document you'll find a link to on the Module 1 page:

http://web.me.com/davidrichardson8/englishcourses/bw8/bw8module1.htm

There's also a link to an EU English Style Manual (it's very common for large organisations to produce style manuals which everyone who writes for the organisation is expected to follow).

We hope you find them useful.

Warm-Up 1

This is the post to which you add your Warm-Up 1 task as a Comment (i.e. click on the Comment button below). When you do that, don't forget to write your name on the post! You'd be amazed how much detective work I sometimes have to do!

Warm-Up 1 asks you to write a personal presentation for a web site. This is a general message that goes out to everyone who visits the web site of the new company you've just got a job with. I.e. it needs to be informative, but a bit general - and a good piece of advertising for your new employer. In other words, you need to show how smart your new employer is for hiring you!

You'll find a couple of useful links on the Warm-Up 1 page: one from the 'How to Do Things' site with some general advice, and an example of personal presentations from the Ericsson company.

When the Warm-Ups have all been marked and sent back (by me, David), I'll post a general comment in a post on this blog, with advice for everyone about Send-In Task 1.

It's Time to Get Started!

It's 1st February and the winter is upon us - feels like it's Course Launch Day for the Business Writing course. We're starting a journey which will end when spring is in the air … by which time we on the course team hope that you'll have improved your written business English no end! You're all advanced students of English, so you'll just have to accept that improving from a level which is already pretty good is going to be a slow process. We on the course team aim to give you the feedback and help you need to do this, though.

What happens now is Warm-Up 1 and Send-In 1. There's a podcast available soon which tells you a little about what you have to do, and the next post on this blog is the Warm-Up 1 post, which is where you actually post your Warm-Up.

You'll find the instructions for Warm-Up 1 and Send-In 1 in Module 1, together with some exercises to help you write good ones.