Report Shopping List - Whiteboard grab

Compiled last night in A8, this list is also useful for FCE students. Ask questions by clickin on this post if you wish and add a comment.

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Things to Remember: Exam Writing Checklist

Six months work have got us to the point where many of you can give advice from your own work on how to check work, so here's what three groups put together:

TPS/TPP = third person singlular/plural

Some more points that didn't get on the board:

10. Avoid repeating words, especially within sentences - look for pronouns.

11. Becareful of those deadly three dots!

12. Do everything you can to avoid mistakes in your first and last sentences - "Dear Alan, I am writting..."

And finally...

13. Read over our Things to Remember thread!

Whiteboard Grab: 5 Questions

Here's a recent whiteboard related to planning your writing.

Remember to try to be as specific as possible with the consequences that come from your answers to the questions.

Here's an example if it was, for instance, an email to Sally about your holidays:

Q1 . Who´s it for? My friend, Sally.

> So it's informal

>> So I start with something like "Hi Sally!"

>>> So I finish with "Write soon!"

>>>> Just before that I probably need something like "Keep in touch" or "Let me know"

>>>>> I probably need something like "Thanks for the email" at the start too.

>>>>>> I need to remember it's informal when I express other functions (asking for things, apologising perhaps) and in my vocabulary.

Do the same for questions 2 to 4 and question 5 is the total of 1 to 4, pretty much.

Good luck!

Whiteboard Grab: Avoidable Error Checklist

Here's another whiteboard image. It's a checklist to help you try to stop your teacher getting to your mistakes before you do. Click on the photo to enlarge, and ask us if you have questions about the whiteboard.

Whiteboard grab: Ingredients for a Review

From January 25th, 6 key things for a review. Apologies for the poor photo. That disappearing word in the third point is "recommendation"!

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Bad News

Some excellent work from A8 tonight (but, confession time, some terribly untidy boardwork by me) produced this superb formalised version of "I can't..."

Unfortunately, I'm afraid I have to tell you it looks like we may not be able to...

OK, it's too much for one sentence really, but lots of useful bad news English. Good work everyone!

Brian

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Advice for all your writing.

Presented to A8 on Wednesday 14 October.

The photo is not very good, so here's what you need to remember

- the question is king
- obey word limits
- be the writer not "a student"
- write to the recipient, not (usually) the teacher
- make it look right from a distance
- Experiment - risk-taking is good
- use your student book and online resources intelligently

Questitions or comments welcome

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Whiteboard Grab; Informal Letters

This is a whiteboard grab from last year's course.

This one was used in answer to a question in an S6 group about phrases for starting informal letter paragraphs.

You can click on it to see a bigger version. Try to borrow a few phrases to help your work.

If anything's not clear, let us know.