General Comment on Warm-Up 2

Firstly, my apologies for the late posting of this feedback - last week was really busy!

This Warm-Up Task was generally really well done too! Most people worked out that a letter of complaint to a company has a much better chance of working if you keep your comments factual and dispassionate. In other words, if you just want to let off steam, it's much better to go to a coffee shop or a pub with your friends and get it off your chest. If, on the other hand, you want to actually get some money back, lose the emotive language and just tell the company what happened … and what you want them to do about it!

As regards specific linguistic problems, my first message is to read the comments I made last time! There are a lot of 'frequently-made mistakes' in business English and some of you made the same ones again.

Apart from that, I've referred to 'count nouns' and 'uncount nouns' quite a bit this time. This is a bit of grammatical shorthand for two types of nouns in English (and in other languages too): ones which refer to separate (usually concrete) things; and ones which refer to abstracts.

E.g. if you write 'chair', you're referring to something that can be counted, stacked, sold separately, etc.

If you write 'rice', you're referring to something that is a general idea (because as soon as you start counting them, you're counting grains of rice, not the general idea of rice!).

There are some rules about how you write count and uncount nouns:

Count nouns have to have a 'determiner' in the singular. A determiner is one of those words like 'this', 'my', 'the' and 'a'. That means that you can't write: "Table's laid …" but you can write "… dinner's ready!" because 'dinner' is an uncount noun.

Uncount nouns don't have to have a determiner … and they don't have plural forms, so the question of singular or plural doesn't come into it. You can use nearly all the determiners with them … with the exception of 'a' or 'an'!

The problem is that nouns that are uncount in one language might be count in another. There are a few common Swenglish problems in this area, such as 'advice' and 'news'. You can't say 'an advice' or 'a new' in English, like you can in Swedish.

Warm-Up 2 has a couple of these tricky cases: 'compensation' and 'inconvenience'. In English both of these are nearly always used as uncount nouns (I can think of one very rare case of them being used as count nouns) … so you can't write 'a compensation' or 'an inconvenience'. Since uncount nouns don't have plural forms either, the word 'inconveniences', whilst being a lovely word, doesn't actually exist in English!

One final point: beware of 'damage' and 'damages'! 'Damage' is an uncount noun which describes what happens when objects get broken. If it's people getting broken, it's called 'injury'. 'Damages', on the other hand, are the payment a court orders someone to pay when they have caused either damage or injury to a thing or a person.

Make sure you don't mix these up, or the reader of your letter of complaint will jump to the conclusion that you're looking for an outcome of your dispute in a court of law (which naturally takes away a lot of the incentive to settle the dispute quietly - and cheaply!).

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, 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.

Warm-Up 1 - General Commentary

This Warm-Up was done very well indeed. You all managed to strike a good balance between professional and personal information (with the emphasis on the former, where it should be). Nearly everyone found the right tone for a presentation like this: in between formal and informal!

There were one or two common problems with details of the language. As I've written to some of you, these minor errors tend to be treated disproportionately harshly in written, formal language (i.e. the readers often make unwarranted assumptions about your seriousness - and sometimes even your intelligence - if you make them!).

1. Capital Letters

Lots of you had problems getting these in the right place. There's an exercise about them in Module 1, by the way. Here are some of the 'frequently-made mistakes'!

• Academic subjects need capital letters in English. Take a look at this example:

She used what she learned studying Psychology at university when she used psychology on her boss to get a raise.

So if you have a degree in something, what you studied needs a capital letter.

• All of the information words in titles need capital letters too:

Director of Accounts Department

The words which give you information are: Director, Accounts and Department. 'of', on the other hand, is there to 'hold the other words together', so it doesn't need a capital letter. (In Swedish you usually capitalise the first of these words, but not the others.)

2. Girls and Women

If you describe someone as a 'girl', you're implying that they're quite young (say, 12 years old) and inexperienced.

However, why would you describe yourself as a 'woman' at all? The world of business in English is, unfortunately, rather sexist and it's always a bit problematical to be identified first as a woman and only then as a competent manager. Why not just say "I am a manager" unless there's some very special reason for identifying yourself as a woman … unless you're prepared for a fight!

3. Count Nouns and Uncount Nouns

Most languages divide nouns up into ones which describe concrete things (like 'spoon') and ones which describe abstract things (like 'love'). The 'concrete' ones are called 'count nouns' in English grammar and the 'abstract' ones are called 'uncount nouns'. Swedish has them as well … but unfortunately there are some differences in the lists in the two languages (you can say 'en nyhet' in Swedish, but not 'a new' in English!).

Count nouns need something called a determiner in English when they're in the singular (one of those words like 'a' and 'this'). Uncount nouns, on the other hand, can't take the general determiner ('a' or 'an'), and they don't have plural forms. So if you miss out the determiner altogether for a word which looks like it's singular (e.g. no 's' on the end), make sure that it's one of these abstract nouns.

We call them 'count' nouns, by the way, because you can break them down into separate units (one spoon, two spoons, three spoons, etc).

4. Organisations' Names

Most organisations have an official name in English nowadays. 'KTH' (Kungliga tekniska högskolan), for example, calls itself 'Royal Institute of Technology' in English … and you're going to need a 'the' in front, since it's unique. If you're writing for an international audience, however, it might be a good idea to add 'in Stockholm', since there are plenty of places which might have a royal institute hiding away somewhere!

There's no particular 'danger' in translating the name of an organisation yourself, but if you have, say, a certificate using a particular translation into English, but you use a different name on, say, your CV, this could cause confusion.