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!).