Feedback on Warm-Up 1

I think I've marked all the Warm-Up 1s which have come in so far. If you've submitted yours, but not received feedback from me, mail me and I'll see if I can find out what happened to it.

If you haven't submitted your Warm-Up 1 yet, it's not too late! I'm quite happy to mark tasks which come in after the due dates, so just post it on the blog and I'll get an automatic notification.

I was very pleased with your efforts! You managed to produce personal presentations which had the right degree of informality, but were still rather formal. You managed to meet the goal of showing why the company was smart to hire you, too, which is probably the main function of such public personal presentations (i.e. it's all about your company, not about you!).

Remember, though, that the Send-In 1 presentation to existing clients will have to use a different tone (your Internet Tutor can help you out if you're not quite sure which tone to use!).

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Here are some general comments about the language you all used (you could call these 'frequently-made mistakes'!).

1. There's an exercise about capital letters in Module 1 - it's worth taking a look at it. Common capital letter mistakes were with job titles and academic subjects. If you're the boss of the company, your title is:

Managing Director

I.e. all the 'information words' in a title need capital letters, not just the first one. ('Information words' are the words which convey information, rather than being there for grammatical purposes, so words like 'of' and 'a' aren't usually capitalised).

Sometimes, though, job titles are generic (i.e. they describe a position you'll find in most companies, such as 'accounts clerk'). In those cases they aren't your specific job title, so they need lower-case letters.

Take a look at this example of academic subject titles too:

"He used psychology on his Psychology lecturer to get an extension for his late essay."

Note that the first 'psychology' is the generally-understood idea of messing with people's minds, whereas the second one is an academic subject. Words like 'engineering' and 'computer science' often create a certain amount of confusion if you get the capitalisation wrong.

2. If you're going to use a continuous verb (e.g. "I have been working here for four years.") you're stressing the passing of time. If you're stating a fact, you're going to use the simple form ("I work here as a computer technician." Note the generic job title without capital letters!).

In business communications you're most often stating facts, so ask yourself whether you really, really need that continuous tense, if you want to use one.

3. Talking about -ing forms, not all of them are verbs. There's a whole class of words called prepositions and these need some kind of noun form after them. For example:

I'm looking forward to a nice cup of coffee.

I'm looking forward to seeing you.

That 'seeing' is a noun form, not a verb form, and 'to' is a preposition, even though it sometimes works on the side in parts of verbs!

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

4. Semi-colons definitely make your writing look posh … if you get them right!

The key thing to remember about semi-colons is that whatever they are being used to separate, the separated items must be equal in strength. The items also need to be longer and more complex - if they're simple and short, a comma would probably be better.

5. If, however, you're writing a sentence with one 'heavy' section and another 'light' one (e.g. where the 'light' section is a consequence of or 'follow-on' to the 'heavy' one), then you need a colon (if you're being formal) or a dash (if you're being less formal), like this:

In 2011 the company developed a new strategy: to break into the Far Eastern market.

The bit to the left of the colon is the main message of the sentence; the bit to the right of the colon is a further explanation of the main message. (I hope you noticed the use of a semi-colon here too!).