You all did a good job with Warm-Up 2: congratulations! However, I've got three general observations to make about how you tackled the task. The first is about your strategies, which leads on to a comment about emotive language, which leads on to a comment about colloquialisms.
In the best Warm-Up 2s, students described their grievances dispassionately and factually, and then made clear what it was they expected the company to do to redress their grievances in very concrete terms. Some of you, though, succumbed to the temptation to let off steam and used very emotive language to describe their grievances in subjective terms. Doing this doesn't mean that you won't get satisfaction ultimately, but it could result in the company thinking either that here's a customer who could cause us trouble, so we'll refer her to our Legal Department (who'll take months to answer you!), or that here's a customer who's already gained satisfaction (by bawling us out), so we don't need to send her any money!
Dispassionate, verifiable descriptions, on the other hand, give the impression first that here's a reasonable person it'll be a joy to deal with (Complaints Departments clerks are human beings too, you know!), but also that here's someone who isn't going to let this drop.
You have to bear in mind, too, the disparity in your bargaining strengths. A company in New York might very well judge that someone in Sweden isn't going to go to all the trouble of suing them in a foreign country over a matter of a couple of hundred dollars, so your option of taking them to court isn't really a viable one in this situation.
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Then we get on to emotive language … Describing the car as 'filthy' is a different matter from describing it as 'dirty'. The latter is a 'straight' description, which is also verifiable; the former is a value judgement (one person's 'lived-in and comfortable' may well be another's 'filthy', especially if one of you is a teenage boy and the other is his mother!). There are lots of emotive words in English (one of the reasons why English dictionaries are so large). If you think about the different words to describe degrees of anger in English and Swedish, for example, you can see that there are just more of them in English. This doesn't mean that English- and Swedish-speakers have different reactions when they're angry - all those extra words in English (such as 'raging', 'fuming', 'incandescent', etc) describe the same objective condition, but create different emotional effects.
Using emotive language is rarely a good idea in business communications. We're rather 'Far Eastern' in written business contexts. In many Far Eastern countries (such as Vietnam) someone who reveals that they're angry has lost face and makes his or her bargaining position weaker. This is a very common attitude among Western readers and writers of business English. Basically, if you feel hard done by, it's better to have a moan with your mates than to bother writing a letter. If you're going to write a letter, making it objective and dispassionate is much more likely to achieve your aims (which usually involve getting your money back).
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Finally, several of you had the word 'colloquial' in your comment from me, and you might be wondering what I was talking about. Colloquial language is the kind of language you say (or write in informal letters), rather than the kind of language you write in formal contexts. If you think about the words 'buck' or 'quid' (for dollars and pounds), everyone knows what they mean (i.e. they're not slang), but you wouldn't expect to read them in a contract. Here's a list of words which I'd advise you to steer clear of in formal contexts:
- get (use 'obtain', 'gain', 'receive' or 'become' for the various nuances of this word)
- maybe (use 'perhaps')
- big (use 'great' or 'major' for importance and 'large' for size)
- any short form (such as 'I'm', 'can't' or 'don't' - write them out in full instead)
People who look down on formal letters which contain colloquial language aren't just being prejudiced and old-fashioned (although this a major factor) - formal language is usually more precise than its colloquial equivalent. In a negotiation, for example, you might quote the unit price of one of your products in speech as "about 20 bucks", but if the actual price is $21.99, the difference will be very great if the customer's ordering 100,000 units!
If you're uncertain about whether a particular word is too emotive or colloquial, just ask one of the teaching team - we'll be glad to help you out.
Good luck with Send-In 2 … and have nice weekends!
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