General Feedback on Warm-Up 1

I think I've now finished marking Warm-Up 1 (if you've submitted it, but not received any feedback yet, please get in touch and I'll find out what's happened to it). You did a really good job writing personal presentations, with nearly everyone remembering 'features and benefits'.

This is a concept which pops up all the time in the world of business, and it's a concept from the field of sales and marketing. It's not enough to say "I have a Bachelor's degree in Marketing" - you have to also demonstrate why this is is going to be of benefit to your new company.

There were one or two problems which appeared in several of the Warm-Ups, so here's a more extensive explanation of what went wrong, why it was wrong and how to put it right.


1. 'Girl'

Unfortunately, the world of business in many English-speaking countries is still quite sexist. A 'girl' in English is usually a female less than 12 years of age, or, in the world of business, a woman whose job it is to provide services like making the coffee! 'Young lady' is what I sometimes say to tease my 8 year-old daughter … so my suggestion is just to call yourself a 'woman'. You're going to have to be a bit more hard-nosed than you would have to be in Sweden anyway, so if I were a woman, I'd just tough it out! (This, incidentally, is connected with the practice of women calling themselves "Ms. Svensson", instead of "Miss Svensson" or "Mrs Svensson" - why should you let people define you according to your marital status?).


2. Capital Letters

There's an exercise about the main occasions when you need a capital letter on the initial letter of a word in Module 1. I recommend that you take a look at it! There are two specific cases which came up again and again as I was marking these Warm-Ups:

a. Job Titles

A 'sales assistant' is a generic job, involving taking the money when people want to buy things. A 'Sales Assistant' is someone whose job title it is. The first type of person could well work in a supermarket, whilst the second type might well have a responsible position in, say, a computer services company. There's been a kind of inflation in job titles over the last 30 years, so someone who describes themselves as a 'Service Manager' could be the head of department employing hundreds of people, or it could be a cleaner!

b. Academic and School Subjects

Look at these two examples:

"She remembered what she'd learned on her Psychology course at university, and used psychology on her boss to get a raise."

"She studied Economics at university, so she knew the economics of the proposal just weren't going to work.

The green words are academic subjects, whilst the red ones are the words used to describe the general area of knowledge, but in laymen's terms.


3. Colons and Semi-Colons

These are used to divide long sentences up, and they express a relationship between the different parts of the sentence. If you use a colon, you're saying that everything to the left of the colon is more important than everything to the right. The part on the left could be an expression of general principle, for example, whilst the part on the right would be a specific example of that principle. For example:

"The government announced a radical new policy: from now on alcoholic beverages would be sold in all the stores in Sweden."

Semi-colons, on the other hand, divide the sentence up into equally-weighted sections, where each section could almost be a sentence in its own right. For example:

"Swedish culture puts a heavy emphasis on security and safety; in the US people are encouraged to take risks, even though they might risk losing everything."

Take a look at this Dilbert cartoon to understand why you might need semi-colons in business documents:

4. Academic Titles

The main three awards you achieve from university study in the English-speaking world are:

Bachelor's Degree (usually after 3 years of full-time study)
Master's Degree (usually after an additional 1 or 2 years of full-time study)
Ph.D., sometimes called a 'doctorate' (the time it can take to achieve this qualification varies, but the standard in the English-speaking world is 3 additional years)

This is how I describe my Bachelor's Degree:

B.A. (Hons) (Warwick University)

If I want to describe what I've studied more informally, I might write:

"I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Politics from Warwick University."
(Note the 'in').

or

"I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in …"

A general rule is to use whatever form of words (in English) you'll find on your degree certificate. Unfortunately, there are university departments outside the English-speaking world who've made up their own titles in English - it's best to stick to the form of words it says on the certificate, even if it's wrong!

Here's my full academic title:

David Richardson, B.A. (Hons) (Warwick), PGCE (Goldsmiths), DipRSATEFL, Esq.

The 'Hons', by the way, means 'Honours', which indicates a more advanced type of final grade, and the 'Esq,' is short for 'Esquire' which replaces 'Mr' when you're really showing off how clever you are! At some point I received a letter from the institutions involved granting me permission to use these specific abbreviations after my name.


5. Colloquial Language

This means 'the language you speak, rather than the language you write'. You might say, "Give me my money back!" but you'd write "I would like you to reimburse me" in a formal letter. Everyone knows, for example, that 'buck' means 'US dollar', but it doesn't say 'buck' on your contract of employment.

You'll find that various common words are too colloquial for formal English: 'get' is one of them. The problem with 'get' is that it's too vague: do you mean 'get' as 'obtain', 'get' as 'receive' or 'get' as 'become', for example?


6. Company is or Company are?

'Company' is a collective noun in English, and all those nouns can be seen in two different ways: either as describing a unit, or as describing a collection of individuals. Thus, when a company acts as a legal entity, you write:

"The company is considering expanding into China."

But when you see the company as a collection of individuals, you write:

"The whole company are going away to a holiday resort for a week, as a reward for excellent work last year."


7. 'Natur'

Now here's one for the Swedes! 'Nature' is not a good translation of 'natur'. Culturally, the English-speaking world sees the natural world as something that's 'other' or 'alien', whilst Swedish culture sees it as something you take part in and are part of. Thus 'natur' might be 'countryside' or 'scenery', 'the open air' or 'the great outdoors'! 'Nature' usually describes some psychological trait, like "She had a very nice nature".


8. … and finally one particularly for the Eastern Europeans and Far Easterners, but perhaps Swedes need it too!

Nouns in English are broadly divided into 'count nouns' (which describe specific instances of something or individual objects) and 'uncount nouns' (which describe general phenomena). Thus 'chair' is a count noun, whilst 'rice' is an uncount noun.

Count nouns have to have what's called a determiner in front of them in the singular. This is a word like  'a', 'the', 'my', 'this' … and there are quite a few more. However, they don't have to have one in the plural.

Thus,

"I haven't got chair in my room"

is definitely wrong (should be "… a chair …"), whilst

"Go and see if there are chairs we could borrow" is quite OK.

Uncount nouns can be written without determiners:

"Rice is a natural and healthy foodstuff"

… and they don't have plurals, so the question never arises! However, they're never written with 'a' or 'an'!

Just to complicate matters, there are plenty of words in English which can be count or uncount, depending on the context in which they're used. Here's one which appeared many times in the Warm-Ups: 'experience'.

Look at these two examples:

"My experience in China will be of great help to the company."

(Here you're talking about your experience of China in general, not any specific occurrence.)

"My experiences in China taught me a lot about Chinese culture."

(Here you're talking about specific things that happened to you in China, which told you something about their culture.)