This Warm-Up was all about writing sentences for inclusion in a letter of complaint, and people did a really good job on this! The trick is to describe the situation factually and dispassionately, and then to state clearly what it is you expect the company to do to redress your grievances. In this case, we're talking about a refund of 50% on the hire charge, plus the $50 you had to lay out to the tow truck driver. The situation was set up to make it a little tricky to create the right grammar! You were asking for a percentage + an absolute figure, so you needed to reflect this difference in the grammatical structure of your sentences.
Most of you resisted the temptation to score points off your recipient - a very good move. Remember that this is actually quite a small claim, so the poor clerk in the head office just wants to find out how much to pay you. If you make him or her wade through a long invective against his or her company, the clerk might well get bored with the whole exercise and just toss your letter to the bottom of the pile, in the hope that you'll go away!
-------
… and now for a bit more grammar!
Complex, formal sentences, like the ones you've just been producing, almost invite you to make mistakes! And they often involve tricky aspects of grammar too - some of which came up in my corrections.
1. Counts, uncounts and the zero article
Nouns (called 'substantiv' in Swedish) in English are usually split up into two main categories, counts and uncounts. Count nouns usually describe objects such as books, pens or web pages, whilst uncount nouns describe general, amorphous feelings and situations like love, anticipation … and inconvenience.
Sometimes you can look at an idea from two angles: a concrete one and an abstract one. Thus, you might run into me in your car, causing 'damage' to my briefcase (i.e. the leather got scratched). If you refuse to pay up, I might sue you for 'damages' (i.e. a punitive sum of money you have to pay the court, which the court pays me).
Nouns are nearly always preceded by 'determiners' (words like 'the', 'my' and 'several') … but there's also something called the 'zero article' (i.e. not using one at all). Count nouns in the singular require a determiner of some sort (i.e. can't be written with the 'zero article'), but they can have a 'zero article' in the plural:
I need to rent a car. (Not: *I need to rent car*)
Cars must be returned by midnight on the last day of the hire.
Uncounts, on the other hand, don't have plurals (i.e. they're all 'singular') and they can take a 'zero article':
Your actions have caused me a great deal of inconvenience.
… and, of course, not having plural forms, the word *inconveniences* unfortunately doesn't exist!
2. Will versus would
"I told her that I would marry her, but now I've changed my mind"
"I told her that I will marry her, and we'll be in the church next Sunday, whether you like it or not!"
When you're reporting on a conversation which took place in the past, you've got a choice to make about how you talk about it. If you use a past tense (like 'would'), you're putting the entire report in the past. However, the incident you're reporting on might well be an on-going event at the time you're making the report (i.e. now).
If you write, though,
"Your employee told me I will receive a refund …"
You haven't quite made the sequence of events clear. The recipient might well conclude that the company aren't late with the refund yet (since you 'will' get it one day!). Using would here makes it quite clear that the promise was that the refund should have already arrived.
3. 'Calibrating' your language
There are forms and phrases you can use in informal writing (such as tweet or a letter to a friend) which you can't use in formal writing (or you should, at least, try to avoid). Here are some of the ones to avoid:
• get
• big
• maybe
• short forms (like 'I'm')
• 'And' or 'But' at the beginning of sentences
OK, people are prejudiced, but writing formal letters or mails in the same language you'd use to send a text to a friend is going to make you look like a lightweight.
If in doubt, ask your Internet tutor (or me).
Wow - this one ended up as a long one. As usual, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or thoughts about this (you can use the Comment feature on this post too).
No comments:
Post a Comment