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.
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Monday, 22 March 2010
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).
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
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'.
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'!
Friday, 26 February 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, 25 February 2010
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!
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!
Thursday, 11 February 2010
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.
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.
Monday, 1 February 2010
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.
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.
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