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! Let us all know which strategies for complaining and apologising have worked for you in the past.

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, 25th April (when I activate the link on the 'exam' page of the Module 4 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). Open Office documents (.odt format) will also work.

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 60 marks, you've passed, and when the total exceeds 80 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 1st June … but, as usual, we'll be understanding if you're a little late.

Feedback on Warm-Up 3

I think I've marked all the Warm-Up 3s - if you've sent one in, but not received any feedback, please get in touch and I'll see what's happened. If you've not sent one in yet, there's still time - just enter it on the blog when you're ready.

So here's my feedback …

You all did well on this task! Nearly everyone worked out that a formal report will tend to concentrate on facts and situations, whilst an informal one will often focus on people and actions. You have to use a different type of language too: informal language tends to be less precise and more vague, whilst formal language needs to be as precise as you can make it. That's why words like 'get' aren't often found in formal writing: there are over 50 different meanings of the word in the main Oxford English Dictionary … and the reader of a report needs to know precisely which one you're intending them to understand.

You generally did a good job of finding the colloquialisms in what the inspector said. Words like 'hardhat' and 'digger' are colloquial, whereas, strangely enough, 'dumper truck' isn't.

This is what a dumper truck looks like, by the way:

There were some fairly specific points about language that I want to take up with everyone:

1. Rules and regulations

Clubs, associations and organisations have rules. If you break them, you don't get fined or sent to jail, but you might find that you aren't welcome as a member of that organisation any more.

Regulations are connected with laws. There'll be a law, for example, about safety at work, but the law will need to be backed up with detailed regulations about what you need to do or not do in order to obey the law. Thus the law might specify that safety barriers have to exist, but a regulation will state how high they have to be.

2. Obligatory/compulsory

… which are connected with rules and regulations again! Strictly speaking, an obligation is something that results from you being subject to rules, whilst compulsory is connected with the idea that you can't avoid doing something, even if you wanted to. Thus it's obligatory to obey rules (if you want to stay in the club), but compulsory to obey regulations (if you want to avoid prosecution).

3. Request and require

If you request something, you're asking; if you require something, you're telling! People enforcing laws and regulations tend to require, rather than request.

4. Safety and security

In English safety tends to involve physical safety, whilst security tends to involve psychological feelings of not being in danger. So a Safety Officer will advise workers about how to avoid being hurt, whilst a Security Officer patrols the site at night to make sure that no-one enters it and starts messing about with things or stealing them.

5. Injury, damage and damages

These three words are tricky!

Animate objects, like people and animals, can sustain injuries; inanimate objects, like machines or buildings, can sustain damage; damages, on the other hand, is the money you have to pay out if you've been sued and found liable (skadestånd in Swedish).

6. The company is … or the company are …?

You can see a company in two different ways: as a legal entity or as a collection of individuals who happen to work there. So when you're talking about things the company does as a legal entity, it's going to be singular (is). When the company is acting as a group of individuals, it's plural (are):

The company is introducing a revolutionary new product!

The company are all away on a team-building exercise today.

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 she's on a site visit, but the written version of her recommendations will use different grammatical structures and different words … because it's written and formal, not spoken and informal.

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

The podcast relating to this task and Send-In 3 has just been published too.

Feedback on Warm-Up 2

I've just finished marking the Warm-Up 2 tasks and here's some general feedback (if you've submitted the Warm-Up, but not received feedback, let me know and I'll see what's happened; if you've not submitted yet, it's not too late!).

Firstly, nearly everyone worked out that the best way to get your money back is to be calm, dispassionate and factual. It's tempting to let off steam, but the only practical effect of that (in a letter of complaint) is to make things take longer! The recipient of this letter probably just wants to get rid of you by paying you off (the sums involved are tiny), so she probably wants to avoid bad publicity, more than anything else. On the other hand, she's not going to admit anything that might end up costing the company mega-bucks in a court case!

There were one or two cases where the letter came across as much too informal too. You're trying to impress on the company that they're dealing with a professional - someone who's angry at the moment, but could easily be placated by the insertion of money into her bank account! You need to be strictly formal in this letter, so using 'get', short forms or friendly closures like 'Best regards,' aren't a good idea.

Here are some specific points about language which cropped up in Warm-Up 2:

1. Defining and non-defining relative clauses

Sorry to get all technical on you!

Relative clauses often start with 'which' or 'that', and there are some of them that provide information essential to your reader's understanding of what you're talking about ('defining relative clauses') and some which add a little extra information, but aren't strictly necessary for your reader to understand the basic message ('non-defining relative clauses'), like these ones:

Defining relative clause:

He gave her the password which opened her computer account.

(I.e. out of all the passwords in the world, this one was the special one which did the job.)

Non-defining relative clause

She used the password to open her account, which meant that she was able to answer her new boss' mail on time.

(I.e. using the password is one thing - answering the mail is another.)

Did you notice the punctuation?

Non-defining relative clauses use a comma, defining relative clauses don't.

What this comma does is shows your reader what connections you're making between information in your sentence. There are cases where getting this connection wrong can make it extremely difficult for your reader to understand what you're saying.

In the defining relative clause example above, for example, putting a comma in says that the password somehow opened the account all on its own, without her needing to do anything. You can imagine other sets of instructions where this might really confuse someone. Let's say they have to carry out two operations. Making what you need to carry out the first one use a non-defining relative clause could easily make someone imagine that they don't need to do anything else, like this:

Take the key, which opens the security lock, and fetch the file from the filing cabinet inside the file room.

(Non-defining relative clause … so it's 'extra', unimportant information … so the person fetching the file could well end up standing outside the room with a key in his hand, not realising that he has to use it to get into the room!)

Take the key which opens the security lock and fetch the file from the filing cabinet inside the file room.

(Defining relative clause - it's much more clear what the person has do now, isn't it.)

This may seem to be terribly unimportant, but remember that famous Swedish example:

Avrätta ej vänta!

(Execute - not - wait)

Is that 'Avrätta ej, vänta!' (Don't execute [him], wait!) or 'Avrätta, ej vänta!' (Execute [him], don't wait!)?

2. In/on/at

Prepositions often cause problems - it's usually more or less impossible to explain why you use one, not another. In this case though …

When you're talking about time and place,

IN is for the big things (in Sweden/in 2012)

ON is for the middle-sized things (on Main Street/on Monday)

AT is for specific points (at the corner of Main Street and Lexington/at 3.00 pm).

Here's a diagram which could help:

3. Simple and Continuous Verb Tenses

Look at these two sentences:

A. The car broke down as I drove into New York.

B. The car broke down as I was driving into New York.

Which one is right?

Well … it all depends what message you're trying to convey! 

(A) is probably the best alternative in this particular context, because writing "drove" indicates that this is a situation which is finished and in the past.  What (B) conveys is the process and length of time the driving was taking. It provides a much more vivid picture of the problem you had … which is great when you're telling your friends over a cup of coffee or a drink what a traumatic time you had in New York, after you get home, but it introduces an element of emotive language which you're probably better avoiding in this letter.

Take these three possible witness statements about a bank robbery:

i) As I got out of my car, a man was coming out of the bank with a gun in his hand.

ii) As I was getting out of my car, a man came out of the bank with a gun in his hand.

iii) As I was getting out of my car, a man was coming out of the bank with a gun in his hand.

Experienced detectives often develop an instinct about which statement is most reliable, and this instinct is often based on grammar! Which one would you trust most?

Witness (i) saw the leaving of his or her car is a 'finished' action in the past, whilst the man coming out of the bank was something that he or she saw as an action which took time.

Witness (ii) saw the situation the other way: he or she was concentrating harder on getting out of the car, whilst the man with gun was a passing or fleeting experience.

Witness (iii) divided his or her attention between the two.

A detective would probably rely most on Witness (i)'s description of what the robber looked like, how he was dressed and which way he went. The detective probably wouldn't be able to say why she felt that … but a student of English grammar could supply some reasons for it!

4. Colons and Semi-Colons

Here's the general rule:

Colons split sentences into two unequal parts, whilst semi-colons split them into two or more equal parts.

Thus, everything that comes to the right of a colon is an example - or a consequence - of what comes to the left, like this:

There were several issues with the car: the lack of cleaning, the lack of washer fluid and the fact that it broke down on the freeway.

The national anthem of the UK is "God Save the Queen"; the one of the US is "The Star-Spangled Banner".

Sometimes colons are used to introduce lists with complex items in it, with semi-colons separating the items, like this:

The latest upgrade by Apple includes the iWork suite free of charge: Pages, which is the equivalent of Microsoft Word; Numbers, which is a substitute for Excel; and Keynote which is much more versatile replacement for PowerPoint.

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, 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.

By the way, if you want to see what the practical problems of using language that's too strong are (and of letting emotion get in the way of your complaint), take a look at this scene from the film:

http://youtu.be/DsrXZ_Mdehw

Be warned, though. This scene is famous for the large numbers of times the word 'fuck' is used in a very short space of time!

You submit your Warm-Up Task 2 by copying your text into a comment. Remember to include FIVE 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.

Feedback on Warm-Up 1

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.

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 add your Comment, don't forget to write your name on the post! You'd be amazed how much detective work I sometimes have to do to find out who actually wrote the comment!

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.

You'll also find the 'Warm-Up 1 and Send-In 1' Podcast to be of help too.

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.

I've set the Comment function up to accept 'Anonymous' comments. If you choose that option, you'll appear as an anonymous commenter … so it's even more important to put your name (or some kind of identifying detail) on your comment. There could be several 'Anna' or 'Eriks' in the group, so at least give us the initial of your surname!