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!

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, 20th November (via the Business Pages 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).

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 50 marks, you've passed, and when the total exceeds 70 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 (our administrative staff have their hands full with merger business right now, but I've asked them to prioritise this course).

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 and the form you need to send it in order to get a course certificate to put on your wall! (If you also need an Academic Transcript, showing that you've studied this course, please get in touch and we'll organise one of those too. )

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 13th December (Lucia Day) … but, as usual, we'll be understanding if you're a little late.

General Feedback on Warm-Up 3

The task this time was to turn informal, spoken English into formal, written English - and you generally did very well. However, there were a number of points which came up several times, so I've got plenty to write about this time.

To start with, be careful not to include any colloquial language in your reports. 'Colloquial' means 'spoken', and a typical piece of colloquial English is to call the GB pound 'quid' and the US dollar 'buck'. These aren't slang, since everyone knows what they mean (slang can properly only be understood by someone who's in a special group of people), but you don't see the terms used in, say, a contract of employment.

In this task there was plenty of colloquial language in the inspector's comments, such as 'digger' instead of 'excavator' and 'hard hat' instead of 'safety helmet'. 'Dumper truck', on the other hand, is what these small vehicles are called! 'Get' cropped up too a couple of times: you should try to avoid using this verb altogether in formal writing. Use 'obtain', 'receive' or 'become', for example.

One tricky point is that English often uses words which arrived from Romance languages (such as French, Spanish and Latin) for formal purposes, but Germanic words (from Dutch, German and Old Norse) for informal ones. Thus, "we start at 9.00" is informal, whilst "we commence at 9.00" is formal. The Scandinavians in the group thus tended to have greater problems with formality this time than the students from other language backgrounds! It's unfair, but that's life, I'm afraid!!

Short forms (such as 'I'm' and 'they've') were used by a couple of people too. Avoid these in formal writing by writing the abbreviated form in full, e.g. 'I am', 'they have'.

'Rules' and 'regulations' also caused some problems. 'Rules' are made up by members of a particular group or society, whilst 'regulations' have the force of law. Thus a particular practice might be against both union rules and legal regulations. Confusingly, both these words come from the same Latin root - it's just that their meanings have diverged over the centuries, as they've been used in different contexts.

Another group of words which are like this is: 'compulsory', 'obligatory' and 'required'. The Latin roots of the first two amount to more or less the same thing: something forces you to do something. 'Required', on the other hand, originally just meant 'asked for' (any word with '-quire' in it comes from the Latin word 'quaere', which means 'to ask'). However, nowadays 'compulsory' has taken on the connotation of 'necessary according to the rules of an organisation or society' (a bit like 'rules'); 'obligatory' has the connotation of 'morally necessary'; whilst 'required' has the connotation of 'it says so in the law'. Native speakers sometimes mix these up, since, in a particular situation, the difference between things you have to do and things you ought to do can be fairly meaningless - but there's no reason for you to be this sloppy too!

If you think, for example, of the legal requirement to wear a seat belt when you're driving in a car, you are fined if you fail to comply with the legal requirement; you might, however, be disciplined by your company if you fail to observe their compulsory ruling to wear a seat belt whilst driving a company car; and you might feel an obligation to your family to protect your life and health by wearing a seat belt.

'Safe' and 'secure' also caused problems. This is another example of the need to remember the context in which you use a particular word in English. In general, 'safe' refers to physical safety, whilst 'secure' refers to psychological factors. Think of the difference between a 'security officer' and a 'safety officer'. The former is a kind of guard who keeps the bad guys away. The latter makes sure that no-one actually hurts themselves whilst they're on the premises. Sometimes the security officer actually wants to hurt people! If you have Swedish as your first language, ignore the fact that these two words will both be translated as 'säkerhet' in the dictionary, but think of 'safety' as 'trygghet' and 'security' as 'säkerhet'.

Finally, the prepositions 'in-on-at' caused one or two problems. These have 'literal' meanings, but also meanings that have arisen out of usage. I.e. 'in' has a connotation of 'inside', 'on' one of 'on top of' and 'at' one of 'right in front of'. In both time and place, however, they express a range of focus from the very wide to a specific point.

Thus, with expressions of time, you use 'in' for the large unit (in January, in 2010), 'on' for the smaller unit (on Monday), and 'at' for the specific point (at 9.30). When you're talking about space, 'in' is for the large area (in Sweden, in Skåne, in Malmö), 'on' is for a much smaller space (on Nygatan), and 'at' is for the point (at Nygatan 18, at the corner).

The construction site in this exercise is a very ambiguous place! The workers work 'on the construction site' (in the 'literal' sense of the word), whilst visitors arrive 'at the construction site' (the non-literal specific point in space).

If English were easy, you wouldn't need teachers!

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 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.