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 and I tried to make a personal checklist (what to check before you post your messages) for each one of you based on your 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