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!