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.