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.

Feedback on Warm-Up 2

I think I've now finished marking all the Warm-Up 2s. If, however, you've submitted yours, but not received any response, please get in touch and I'll get some feedback to you as soon as I can.

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!

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.

General Feedback on Warm-Up 1

I think that I've now given feedback to all the Warm-Up 1s I've received so far. If you've submitted one (in one way or another), but not received feedback, please get in touch and I'll get your submission marked as soon as possible.

This task was done well by everyone - and outstandingly well by some of you. Nearly everyone worked on the basis that you'd already got the job (i.e. this wasn't a job application), and most people struck the right balance between a lot of professional information and a little bit of personal information (to make you sound like a human being rather than a super-efficient robot!).

The grammatical point I kept coming back to was when to use capital letters. (There's an exercise about these in Block 1, by the way). There are some rules about which words should be capitalised in English, and it's just as odd to put capital letters where they shouldn't be as it is to miss them when they should! Mistakes like these are treated unreasonably harshly by readers of your formal written English, unfortunately, with higher standards being applied to people who clearly don't have English as their first language than to people who do! I.e. we native speakers can get away with mistakes which would be seen as evidence of stupidity or carelessness if you make them!

Take a look at the exercise and feel free to get back to me with questions if you have them.

Good luck with Send-In Task 1!

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.