Responses to your Warm-Up 4s

There's some really good advice in the Warm-Up 4 Comment section! I'd encourage everyone to read it - and, of course, to add your own two-pennorth!

I'm going to be marking a lot of letters of complaint and apology in the next couple of weeks, as you send in your In-Tray Exams. Here's my general advice too:

Complaining

Think your strategy through before you put fingers to the keyboard. The more specific and limited your aims are, the more likely it is you'll achieve them … but if your aim is just to let off steam, it's much more satisfying to go out with your mates and have a moan! In other words, tell the company you're complaining to what happened (objectively and dispassionately) and what you want them to do to compensate you. Most often, the company just want to know how much to send you and where to send it to - the badwill created by messing your around is just so much more expensive than a reasonable sum in compensation.

Remember, too, that it's not your job to effect changes in the company's practices - you just want your money back!

Apologising

The most frequently-made mistake is *not* to actually apologise! And if you wait until the end of your letter to write the magic words "We apologise for …", then it makes the rest of your letter sound like an excuse or a cover-up. You'll almost certainly be suggesting some kind of programme of measures to compensate for the mistake or correct it. Remember to leave the final decision with the client - nothing irritates people more than to have the 'guilty party' presenting you with a fait accompli and then expecting you to be grateful to them!

Read your suggested remedies aloud to yourself too (a great way of discovering mistakes, since you hear mistakes a lot easier than seeing them) - do they actually make sense to you? Remember that you're addressing someone who's likely to be mildly stressed or irritated - they've got to be able to understand what you're suggesting directly.

Good luck with the Exam!

Warm-Up 4 and the In-Tray Exam

Warm-Up 4 doesn't give you any marks (!), but it is, perhaps, a way for you to see the collective wisdom of the group about two key areas in the In-Tray exam: complaining and apologising. Since you don't get any marks for it, you don't have to do it either - but I'm sure that your contributions will be gratefully received by everyone else, if you do!

You publish your Warm-Up 4s as comments to this blog post.

The In-Tray Exam is based on the idea that you work for a temporary agency (like Manpower) and have been sent in to cover the work of one of the people employed by one of the companies on this course. An in-tray is the plastic or metal tray on your desk into which all the paperwork you have to deal with is placed. When you've dealt with it, it's transferred to your 'out-tray' to be sent off or filed.

The exam itself will be posted on the course web site on Friday, 30th April (via the Business Pages section of the site). It's a .pdf document which you can either download or read directly from the screen. When you read it, you'll notice that there are four writing tasks to complete, but you're given three complete sets of tasks to choose between, one for each of the companies in the course materials.

You don't have to stick to the same company for all four tasks - you can switch from one company to another, or you can stay with the same company all the way through.

You submit your In-Tray Exam to David Richardson as a Word document by e-mail. (If you're using Microsoft Works, rather than Word or an equivalent, remember to save the document as an .rtf - Rich Text Format - document, or David won't be able to open it).

When the exam's been received, David will print it on paper, mark it manually, write a mark and commentary for each task, and, finally, add your In-Tray Exam marks to the marks you've received for your Warm-Ups and Send-Ins. When the total exceeds 50 marks, you've passed, and when the total exceeds 70 marks, you've got a 'VG'. Your marks are reported on LADOK, the Swedish national university computer, more or less the same day the exam's marked.

When everything's finished, David puts your exam, the commentary and a statement of your total marks into an envelope and posts it to whatever address we have for you (if you've recently moved, or haven't given us your address, please let us know your current address as soon as possible). He'll also send you a mail straightaway with your final result.

At the end of the final mail is a link to the on-line course evaluation. This is totally anonymous - and, besides, you've already got your mark, so you can say what you like! Feedback from you is very valuable to us (even if you don't get any direct benefit from it!) and all of us on the course team greatly appreciate hearing what you've thought of the course.

Good luck with the exam! The due date is 30th May … but, as usual, we'll be understanding if you're a little late.

General Comment on Warm-Up 3

The task this time was to turn spoken English into formal, written English. I used the word 'colloquial' a lot when I was commenting on your generally excellent answers. A colloquial word or phrase is one which is used in speech, but not often in formal writing. The words 'buck' and 'quid' for 'dollar' and 'pound' are examples of colloquialisms: everyone knows what they mean (so they aren't slang), but your contract of employment won't express your salary in 'quid'. In the inspector's comments, there were several colloquialism, such as 'diggers' and 'hardhats'. It's difficult to know which word is colloquial and which isn't … but that's why you're studying a course with feedback from teachers and tutors!

Good formal language also ought to be precise (which is why there are so many different words in formal English to express all the nuances). A couple of common problems were the differences between rules and regulations, and between safety and security.

Rules are followed on a voluntary basis (if, for example, you want to be a member of a club … or if you want to stay on as an employee of a company!). Regulations, on the other hand, have the force of law. You can thus be disqualified from a sporting event for a breach of the rules, but you could be sent to prison for a breach of the regulations.

Newspeak

In 1984, his novel about a totalitarian future, George Orwell introduced Newspeak - a new language which would make independent thought impossible. Management gurus have invented a newspeak too (take a look at this Dilbert cartoon):

As you can see, 'problem' is one of those words managers like to avoid, in favour of 'issues' - or even 'opportunities'. The problem is that 'issues' can't be 'corrected' or 'fixed' (the way 'problems' can) - they have to be 'addressed'!

Official Names

It's always a good idea to visit an organisation's web site to see what their official translations of various Swedish terms are. The 'arbetsmiljölag' is officially called the 'Work Environment Act'.

Big and Get

These are two colloquial words which ought to be avoided in formal documents (wherever possible).

Get could be obtain, become or receive.

Big becomes 'large', if you're talking about physical size, or 'great' or 'major', if you're talking about importance.

Finally, a bit of grammar …

Both Swedish and English have 'count' and 'uncount' nouns. The distinction is between nouns which refer to things which can be split up into separate items or chunks, such as chairs or boyfriends (!) and nouns which refer to general phenomena, such as attention, machinery or love.

In English uncount nouns only have singular forms and don't have to have words like 'a' and 'the' in front of them (though they can if you want them to). That's why you can't write *the equipment are …* And 'machines' are separate items, but 'machinery' is a general phenomenon, so you write 'the machines are …' but 'the machinery is …'