Tuesday, November 07, 2006

e-tivity 3: Focus on language

Dear all,

I carefully read your blogs, and as I said in the summary, enjoyed them all. I tried to identify the language mistakes that you should not be making and should try and avoid in the future. I listed the words/phrases where there were mistakes but did NOT correct the mistakes. For those of you who were not present in class, we worked in pairs to try and understand what the mistakes were and correct them. In order to make sure you’ve made (or will make) the right corrections, I’ve posted your lists of mistakes to your personal blogs as a comment to your posts. Please go and send another comment with your corrections so that I can check them and let you know if you have or have not understood your mistakes.

We also tried to develop a checklist of things you need to check when you re-read your blog posts before posting them. Here’s a general checklist:

  • Verb tenses (esp. present perfect vs. simple past, present simple vs. present continuous and will)
  • Verb forms (followed by a verb with –ing, to, or infinitive without to)
  • Phrasal verbs
  • Vocabulary (if you use new words, google them in the .edu domain to see if they’re commonly used)
  • Word order (more or less: subject-verb-object-everything else)
  • Articles (if you don’t know “which one”, if you can’t specify the word, don’t use “the”)
  • Pronouns (make sure your pronoun reference is clear and correct)
  • Sentence length (better to have several short sentences than 1 6-line sentence)
  • Punctuation (we’ll work on this together in class, but here’s a good resource for a starting point)

Hope this helps! We’ll see in your blog entries for e-tivity 4!

Sarah

2 comments:

Fedora said...

Dear Sarah,
these are my corrections:
essential to distinguish one blog to
it is essential for a blog to be distinguished from another

the importantce of…?
the importance ofdeterminate

determinate
could determine (determinate is an adjective)

the interaction
Interaction

e.g.
For example

answer to
Answer someone

payed
Paid (I can’t believe I wrote it!)

enough?
You are quite self-critical

English
I didn’t understand the reason why this word is wrong.
I think the mistake is in the lack of the capital letter in the third question of the blog (Can this experience influence my english learning), but you wrote that the word is wrong. Furthermore, this term occurs many times in my blog, what sentence are you referring to?

New terms on the dictionary
New terms in the dictionary

A non academic language
Informal language

The everyday English
Everyday English

Was to organize
Were to (I’m feeling shame at this unforgivable error! Ok, I absolutely must re-read what I wrote)

Francesca

Luigina said...

Dear Sarah,

My corrections are:

since few weeks ago I had no idea of blogging
until few weeks ago I had no idea of blogging

learning English in a completely disparate manner far from the strict academic one.

My dictionary says for disparate: 1.made up of parts or people that are very different from each other 2.(of two or more things) so different from each other that cannot be compared or cannot work together.

learning English in a completely different manner far from...

But avoiding "different" that I used in the previous phrase does

learning English in a completely distinct manner from the academic one

work?


one vs. you for the impersonal structure:

one can learn...

Thi use of one is very formal and now sounds old-fashioned. It is much more usual to use you for "people in general" and I when you're talking about yourself.
so "you can learn" is better

Lara