Blogs
Writing Skills: Checking your work!
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Hello all! It's back to teaching for me . . . today we'll keep looking at writing skills, and how important is to check your work. Of course, this website is for open discussion and talking, but that's no excuse for not checking your grammar! Recognising errors in your own work and in other people's work is a great skill to have, and will help to reinforce and consolidate grammar and vocabulary you already know.
Now when I mark written work, I like to do as little correction as possible - I like to highlight where the errors are and give the student some indication of the mistake. (e.g. bad punctuation, incorrect tense, wrong word choice . . .) That way the students can correct themselves, and they are much more likely to learn from the mistake than if I simply put a line through it and told them the correct way of saying it!
So what I'm going to do this lesson is . . . take some mistakes from people's blogs and write them here. I'll indicate what (and where) the error is in each case - see if you can see why it is wrong and if so, re-write it to be correct! I'll include the correct answers later on.
Let's take 5 mistakes:
1) ". . . together with not more than three months. My colleague introduce him to me and we begin to talk . . ." (wrong choice of tense)
2) "I just took part in the English speaking competition in our school, and they told me that I got the chance to show another speech" (wrong preposition; strange word choice)
3) ". . . my most time is spent on the internet." (word order problem)
4) "Life is short, compared with those buildings which had made its existence for hundreds of years." (wrong tense)
5) "I will take photo for you" (missing a word)
OK, did you try to correct them? Here are the corrected sentences, with an explanation as to why:
1) " . . . together with him for not more than three months. My colleague introduced him to me, and we began to talk . . ." Original is in present simple, but it should be past simple - they were introduced 3 months ago, not today!
2) "I just took part in the English speaking competition at our school, and they told me that I got the chance to give another speech." Preposition should be at, not in. In English the phrase is "to give a speech" rather than "to show".
3) ". . . most of my time is spent on the internet." Incorrect word order - presumably translated straight from Chinese!
4) "Life is short, compared with those buildings which have existed for hundreds of years." Difficult - original used past perfect ("had made") but the present perfect ("have existed") should be used, as we assume that the buildings are still there today - built in the past, exist today = present perfect tense.
5) "I will take a photo for you." Need an indefinite article as photo is a countable noun.
I hope this helped a little, and encourages people to correct themselves and others! Correction is a key skill for writing, and if you can try to correct your own work you'll also figure out where most of your mistakes are - then you can try to work on those areas.
Good evening!
Now when I mark written work, I like to do as little correction as possible - I like to highlight where the errors are and give the student some indication of the mistake. (e.g. bad punctuation, incorrect tense, wrong word choice . . .) That way the students can correct themselves, and they are much more likely to learn from the mistake than if I simply put a line through it and told them the correct way of saying it!
So what I'm going to do this lesson is . . . take some mistakes from people's blogs and write them here. I'll indicate what (and where) the error is in each case - see if you can see why it is wrong and if so, re-write it to be correct! I'll include the correct answers later on.
Let's take 5 mistakes:
1) ". . . together with not more than three months. My colleague introduce him to me and we begin to talk . . ." (wrong choice of tense)
2) "I just took part in the English speaking competition in our school, and they told me that I got the chance to show another speech" (wrong preposition; strange word choice)
3) ". . . my most time is spent on the internet." (word order problem)
4) "Life is short, compared with those buildings which had made its existence for hundreds of years." (wrong tense)
5) "I will take photo for you" (missing a word)
OK, did you try to correct them? Here are the corrected sentences, with an explanation as to why:
1) " . . . together with him for not more than three months. My colleague introduced him to me, and we began to talk . . ." Original is in present simple, but it should be past simple - they were introduced 3 months ago, not today!
2) "I just took part in the English speaking competition at our school, and they told me that I got the chance to give another speech." Preposition should be at, not in. In English the phrase is "to give a speech" rather than "to show".
3) ". . . most of my time is spent on the internet." Incorrect word order - presumably translated straight from Chinese!
4) "Life is short, compared with those buildings which have existed for hundreds of years." Difficult - original used past perfect ("had made") but the present perfect ("have existed") should be used, as we assume that the buildings are still there today - built in the past, exist today = present perfect tense.
5) "I will take a photo for you." Need an indefinite article as photo is a countable noun.
I hope this helped a little, and encourages people to correct themselves and others! Correction is a key skill for writing, and if you can try to correct your own work you'll also figure out where most of your mistakes are - then you can try to work on those areas.
Good evening!
