General Feedback on Warm-Up 1

I think I've finished all the Warm-Up 1s now. If you're still waiting for feedback on yours, please get in touch and I'll see what's happened to it …

Your Warm-Up 1s were generally done very well. You needed to include two different types of information in your presentation: 1) something about what you've done as a person and as a professional thus far in your life; and 2) something about why these qualities and experiences are going to be of benefit to your new employer. Where some of you had problems with this was in making the links between past experiences and future value explicit. In general, it's not enough to just make the information available - you have to spell its significance out too.

'Too colloquial' is a pair of words I typed lots of times! Colloquial language is spoken language of the sort that everyone understands, but people tend not to write, when they're writing formally. If you think of the UK English word 'quid' or the US English word 'buck', everyone knows that these refer to the respective currencies. However, you don't see these words written into contracts of employment - it says 'pounds' and 'dollars' there, respectively. In formal written English, it's important to avoid colloquialisms - and you're going to find out about plenty of them as the course progresses! 'Get' and 'big' were two of the commonest colloquialisms I commented on this time around.

I used Microsoft Word's Comment feature to identify all the errors and usages I wanted to comment on in your work. If this is the first time you've ever had your English looked at in this much detail, don't be downhearted!! It's actually very difficult to produce absolutely faultless English - even for me! Perhaps the most valuable service your tutors and I can perform for you, though, is to let you know what's right and what's wrong. When I look through your Warm-Ups, I identify every single mistake … so you can now safely assume that if I didn't correct it, it isn't wrong! However, you need to distinguish between important and unimportant mistakes. Among the latter are preposition errors (like writing 'in University' when you need to write 'at University'). The accuracy of your language does play a role in arriving at your mark for a Warm-Up, but it isn't a very important one: the content is much more important.

If you have any questions about the feedback you've received, please don't hesitate to ask - I'll be glad to explain to you how I arrived at your mark.

Now you're heading for Send-In Task 1 (remember there's a podcast about it out already). I'm going to create the Warm-Up 2 Blog Post this afternoon, though, so that you've got somewhere to put your sentences from a letter of complaint. Good luck with Send-In 1.