January 8th

Our first class of the year began with a quick review of what every one of us had done during our Christmas break. The destinations were many: Athens, Morocco, the US, Rome, Versailles and even... Paris! Well, no matter how many miles we traveled, it seems that all of us have had very nice holidays. Knowing that everybody was in good shape to start the year, we got down to business, and started talking about the reports that we sent just before the beginning of the break.

Mr. Noble said that, even though he likes to be optimistic about things, he was somewhat disappointed with our work. As for the quality of the writing, they were rather average, with one or two exceptionally good and one or two exceptionally bad. As for the content of the reports themselves, he said that it could have been much better; it seems that we did not understand very well the whole purpose of the work, focusing too much on the "surface" of the news sources instead of highlighting differences in content and bias between the anglo-saxon medium and the other source we chose.

Our teacher then gave us a sheet containing some common mistakes that he had found in our works, and asked us to take a look and try to correct them. We then reviewed each phrase, and, as we went through each one of them, he gave us precious tips to improve our writing, which I will try to reproduce below:

• Use of the semi-colon (;): the function of the semi-colon is to connect two individually meaningful phrases that are somehow related. For example, the phrase

  'the subjects are diversified and elaborate, they are not just hard news'

  is incorrect, since it uses a comma to unite two independent sentences. Thus, it would be more appropriate to write it with a semi-colon: 'the subjects are diversified and elaborate; they are not just hard news.' Note: if the two sentences are not sufficiently related (such as in 'Apples are red.' and 'It snows outside.'), it is better to use a period instead ('Apples are red. It snows outside.');
• Use of the colon (:) and the comma (,): among many other uses, the colon introduces a list of items separated by commas, such as in 'There are three things I love in life: oranges, apples and tomatoes.';
• Use of the past tense: when you use the simple past tense, you have to specify the time in the past when the event you are talking about occurred. If there is no time indication at all, you should probably use the present perfect tense.
• Use of the genitive case (the -'s ending): when used as a possession marker, the -'s ending should only be employed when the possessor of the thing you are referring to is a human being. For example, you can write "Jones's legs" or even "Jones' legs", but never "the chair's legs" - in this case, you have to use 'of': "the legs of the chair." Another example of wrong usage is

  'the US' lack of commitment.'

  In this case, it would be more appropriate to write 'the lack of commitment from the US', or simply 'the american lack of commitment.' Note that 'the US lack of commitment' is not a good answer, since 'US' can not be used as an adjective here. However, there are some specific cases in English where a noun can be used as an adjective, such as in 'the Obama administration';
• Relative clauses: when you already have two sentences connected by 'which', it is not good practice to introduce a third one. Using too much nested relative clauses may make your text difficult to read and introduce unnecessary ambiguities. E.g.: 'About sports, we can notice some light differences in the kinds of sports, which is normal because CNN International is for Americans living in foreign countries, which explains the priority of basketball, hockey and baseball.' It would be better to rephrase it without the second 'which': "(...) for Americans living in foreign countries. This explains (...)".
• Vocabulary: take care with what you write - that is, make sure that your text is really in English (an example of a bad phrase from our reports: 'a photography of the visage' - correct version: 'a photograph of the face');
• Keep it simple, stupid (the KISS principle): although our teacher did not actually use this expression, I think it summarizes a lot of what he said about our writing style. The key to improving our writing in English is keeping things as clear and simple as possible. Using lots of qualifiers won't make your text clear and forceful; au contraire. Also, there is no need for large introduction sections in reports in English: instead of describing in detail what you are going to do, just do it! We have to keep in mind that writing in English is different from writing in French, Arabic, Spanish or Portuguese; each language has its own conventions and practices.

Unfortunately, we did not have any time left neither to discuss our assignment, not to watch another extract of 'Food, Inc.' Nevertheless, it looked like no one had problems in doing the homework, which was a dictation based on a video about McDonald's in China. Well, I am looking forward to watching the rest of the movie, so I hope we will have some spare time next week.

See you all next Thursday, then!