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