I
think that everyone's who posted a Warm-Up 1 has now received feedback on it. If you've submitted a Warm-Up 1, but not received a mark and feedback, please get in touch and I'll see what's happened. I did have one Warm-Up which was
completely anonymous! No name on it and posted anonymously. If the person who posted it would like some feedback on it, just mail me and I'll get the feedback sent back to you as soon as I can.
You handled this task well. Nearly everyone gave us a very clear picture of why the company was smart to hire you, although there were one or two presentations which were a bit vague. Consider these two statements:
A. "I went to Harvard."
B. "I graduated from Harvard in 2010 with a Master's Degree in Economics."
'A' could actually mean that I once delivered groceries there! It could also mean that you spent a term there as an exchange student … but clearly 'B' is a much more impressive statement on a personal presentation. Try, therefore, to avoid vague phrases like "… for a few years …" and "… at several companies …"
Another comment I made on some of the presentations was about 'features' and 'benefits'. This presentation is really about selling yourself as a new manager and a key point about sales is that your 'features' have no value until you've turned them into a 'benefit' for the potential customer. Thus, if I'm trying to sell you a hatchback, just saying that it's a hatchback isn't enough. I need to add something like: "This car's a hatchback, so when you're loading shopping in the back in the rain, you won't get it wet." In other words, try to make an explicit connection between things you've done/qualifications you've achieved and benefits for your new employer.
Now it's time to get down to some grammar!
1. Many of you need to take another look at the capital letters exercise in Module 1. The way capital letters were used was quite varied - sometimes done correctly, sometimes not. You'll also find that native speakers have problems with the rules about capital letters too … but there's a bit of unfairness involved: if people know you're a foreigner, they'll think you're sloppy (or ignorant) if you make a mistake with details like capital letters; if one of us native speakers does the same thing, we're much more likely to be seen as creative geniuses doing new things with the language! However, these minor errors do tend to wind people up, and that's something you need to avoid doing, if you can.
The main areas you need to be careful about are names/titles (remember that
all the information words need them), names of academic subjects (see below), 'nationality' words (English and Swedish, for example) and names of days and months.
Look at this example:
"She used the
psychology she'd learned whilst studying
Psychology at university to persuade her boss to give her a raise."
The
red one is psychology the way most people in society use it: the way some people can use their understanding of how human beings work to achieve what they want. The
green one, on the other hand, is the academic subject you can study at university.
2. Look at these two examples:
A. "I'm looking forward to … a
cup of coffee."
B. "I'm looking forward to …
meeting you again."
The 'to' here is a preposition … and after a preposition you need some kind of noun (called a 'substantiv' in Swedish). Guess what! Those tricky '-ing' forms can sometimes be a sort of noun (they're called '-ing' nouns or gerunds). As you can see above, both of the blue words are noun forms coming after the preposition 'to'.
3. I've used the word 'colloquial' on a few of my comments, particularly in connection with 'get' and 'big'. Colloquial language is the language of speaking - people
say "quid" and "buck", but you'll find the words "pound" and "dollar" written on a contract.
The problems with colloquial language in formal writing are 1) that it looks sloppy; and 2) that it's imprecise. 'Big' is usually expressed as 'large' (for physical size) or 'great' or 'major' (for importance), whilst 'get' could be one of up to over 50 different things! Do you mean 'get' as 'become', or 'get' as 'obtain' or 'get' as 'receive' … or what?
4. Hyphens can be tricky too - they're the English equivalent of "särskrivning" in Swedish. Look at these examples:
"He's a hard working man." (i.e. a working man who's hard - or aggressive)
"He's a hard-working man." (i.e. a man who works hard)
However, often there's a sort of choice. Whether you use a hyphen or not depends on how easy it is to work out what the writer really means:
"She was a problem solving type of person."
Isn't it easier to immediately understand the version with the hyphen:
"She was a problem-solving type of person."
5. Here's another tricky aspect of English: count and uncount nouns. This is a distinction we make between things which can be seen as separate chunks (count nouns), as opposed to things which we only see as a (usually abstract) whole (uncount nouns). And, to make matters even more complicated, you can see some nouns from both perspectives!
Here's a ground rule: count nouns
need a word like 'a', 'the', 'this', 'my' (etc, etc) in front of them in the singular; uncount nouns
can't take 'a' … and they can actually survive without any of these words at all (and they don't have plurals!).
In this Warm-Up, commonly-made mistakes were made with 'employment' (uncount noun - because we're talking about the concept of being employed) instead of 'job' or 'position' (count nouns). However, 'experience' is the really tricky one. Look at these examples:
A. "I had a useful
experience in the US when someone stole my wallet."
B. "I gained useful
experience in the US working for a merchant bank."
The green 'experience' is a one-off occurrence in my life; the red one is talking about a much more abstract set of lessons I learned whilst working for a bank. (In this Warm-Up you'd be much more likely to be talking about B than A).
6. Finally, take a look at these two examples:
A. The company
are going away for the annual team-building exercise.
B. The company
is launching a new product.
Why is there a difference?
Well, the blue one refers to something the people in the company do as separate individuals. The green one refers to the company acting as a single legal entity. You're much more likely to be referring to companies as legal entities on this course!
Good luck with your Send-In Tasks. I'll make the Warm-Up 2 post and the Warm-Up 2/Send-In 2 podcast at the beginning of next week.
