Stop Making Generalisations!

Hello everybody. Now we’re coming to the final lecture in this section of course. So the last lecture on task achievement task response and it’s a fairly brief one. It’s about generalizing and how to stop overgeneralizing if you don’t really know what this means. Don’t worry we’re going to look at it during the course of the lecture. So what are generalizations going to look at that straight away. A generalization is a statement about all members of a particular group which may be true in some or many situations but not necessarily all situations. So we could have a look at an example here. One reason why teenagers and their parents have poor relationships with one another is that so. Look at this sentence. See if you can see what might be a little bit strange about it. Well it’s this part here. Teenagers and their parents have poor relationships. Is this true for all parents and teenagers. No. Surely not. And even if it were it would be impossible to verify. So we have to avoid writing language like this in our task to essay. Generalizations can also be made about situations as well as people. So here’s another example. When employees feel a strong sense of job satisfaction company profits rise company profits rise all the time. Does that always result from a strong sense of job satisfaction. It may often be the case but not always. So we need to make sure to avoid language like this. Now why is avoiding generalizations important. Let’s return to the bad descriptors task achievement band seven states. But there may be a tendency to overgeneralize and or supporting ideas may lacked focus. So that tendency to overgeneralize as you can see you can actually score a band 7 even with generalizations. But why not avoid the generalizations and shoot for a bad day instead of the very least. This is going to give you more room for error in the other band descriptor categories. So how do we avoid overgeneralising. Well we need to soften our statements with appropriate language. We’re going to look at some expressions now some words some phrases and I want you to think of these as generalizing softeners so modal verbs to start with may might could can depending on the context. They can help to soften a generalization frequency language often tend to usually occasionally and non-specific quantify as many some a number of a lot of notice it’s not. Most child avoid most because most is saying more than 50 percent and again can we verify that. Probably not. Most of the time not so try to use these quantifiers instead. These can all be used to soften the broadness of our statements. So we’re going to look at an example and I want you to try and soften this example using these words above. Politicians are influenced by the media which is a problem because this has a negative effect on social equality in the country. So how could we soften this statement. Many politicians are influenced by the media which is often a problem because this can have a negative effect on social equality in the country. So by using a few of these expressions we have avoided making grand sweeping statements about something which we cannot verify. Try to experiment with using some of these in your next essay. Try not to use too many softwares. You don’t want to go overboard but do try and notice where you’re writing a sentence which is a little bit too general is a little bit too sweeping and confident. You may need to reel it back in by using one of these generalizing softeners right. That brings us to a close on task achievement. In the next section we’re going to be talking about vocabulary.