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 …'

Warm-Up 3

Warm-Up 3 is all about turning informal, spoken language into formal, written language. The prompt is the kind of thing a health-and-safety officer might say when he's on a site visit, but the written version of his recommendations will use different grammatical structures and different words.

Remember that you've only got FIVE sentences to produce - you don't need to write the entire report.

Feedback on Warm-Up 2

Sorry it's taken a while to get this feedback out on the blog. I've been suffering from a really stinking cold for about a week now … and it really slows you down!

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!

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… 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).

In, on and at

I've had a question about how and when to use the prepositions 'in', 'on' and 'at' … and I bet there are lots of other people who'd like to know too! So here we go …

To start with, 'in' conveys the idea of 'inside' and 'on' the idea of 'on top of', but what about 'at'? It's something like 'at a place', but that doesn't really tell you anything, because it depends on how you define 'place'.

You can use 'in', 'on' and 'at' in many contexts, but the ones which cause most trouble are those of time and place. Take a look at this diagram:

You tend to use 'in' for the 'big' picture, 'on' for a specific example, and 'at' for a point both in time and space.

Thus, you arrive in London and arrive at Heathrow Airport. On the other hand, if you change your perspective slightly, you might want to specify 'in Terminal 5', 'on the first floor', 'at the ticket counter'. Bear in mind, though, that sometimes these tricky prepositions will retain their 'original' meanings of 'inside' and 'on top of'!

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.