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 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.

General Feedback on Warm-Up 1

I've just finished marking your Warm-Up 1s - and very well you all did too! The task was to write a presentation of yourself for your new employer's web site and everyone did a very good job. The trick was to concentrate on your professional qualities, but to include enough personal information for you to come across as a real person. Nowadays successful companies want to be recognised for what they are, as well as what they do, and it's important for their senior managers to be personal as well as professional.

The most frequently-made mistakes (!) were with capital letters. There's an exercise about these in Module 1, by the way.

There are lots of uses for capital letters in English, but perhaps the trickiest ones are in titles and for academic subjects. I've made the comment "… on the information words in titles …" a few times. 'Information words' are the words which actually tell you something, rather than just being their to help the grammar along. If, for example, you're the person in charge of computer networks in your organisations, you'll be the "Head of IT Systems". Notice that 'Head', 'IT' and 'Systems' take capital letters (because they're part of a title), but 'of' doesn't (because it's not an information word, but a grammar word).

A word of warning, though: quite often companies create a graphic profile for themselves which excludes capital letters (particularly if they're trying to create an image they feel is non-traditional). In cases of companies like these, the rules don't apply! Native speakers also have great problems with capital letters, so don't be surprised if you see us making mistakes.

Here's another tricky case:

"She'd studied Psychology at university, so she used psychology on her boss to get herself a hefty raise."

Why is one 'Psychology' capitalised, but the other not?

Well … in the first case, 'Psychology' is an academic subject at university, whilst in the second it's a general phenomenon …

If you want some extra help with capital letters, remember that the Internet tutors and I are here for you!

Have a nice weekend (writing your Send-In 1s)!

David

Podcasts

I've just published the podcast which describes what happened at the Course Launch yesterday evening. I'll be trying to produce a new podcast more or less every time we progress from one block to the next - with some extras for special events, such as the Course Launch and the publication of the In-Tray Examination at the end of the course.

If you want to listen to the podcasts, there are basically two ways to do it:

1. You click on the Podcasts link on the course home page, and a new page opens with the podcast links on it. If you click on any of these links, you'll come to that podcast page, where there's a Quicktime file for you to listen to. Click on the 'Play' button and the podcast should start playing.

2. On the podcast main page (the one you come to first), there's a button marked 'Subscribe'. If you've got iTunes on your computer, this button will establish a link between the podcasts and iTunes. Then you can get new podcasts directly, by clicking on the 'Refresh' button in iTunes (in the Podcasts section of iTunes). From there you can either listen to them in iTunes, download them to an iPod or burn them on a CD.

You can download iTunes free of charge from: http://www.apple.com/se/itunes