Checking The Essay (Articles / Prepositions / Pronouns)

Everybody welcome to the final lecture in this section on grammatical range inaccuracy after this lecture. You should have a solid understanding of what you need to do to score highly in grammatical range and accuracy. And in this final lecture we’re going to be looking at what to do when you reached the end of the essay. When you finished writing and you should hopefully have a bit of time to check your work what sort of things to check for how to check for them and so forth. So I often say that this is the fastest way to improve your score in task too because these mistakes can often be very quickly fixed and they can make a massive difference to the quality of your writing. So the importance of review time will look at first. Back in the lecture on timing we looked at how long we should be spending on the essay and how long we should be spending on reviewing. Can you remember how long I suggested that we spend on reviewing and checking the work. It was five minutes. Seems like quite a long time but that’s because it’s very important. The difference between a band 6 and a band 7 a lot of the time a sentence is like these other sentence you’re about to see was actually written by one of my students during a writing correction. And this is what she wrote. However each job have different characteristics and the factors which people make feel content are also different. So. The mistakes in this sentence are not difficult to find. Maybe you noticed them straight away as soon as they came up on the screen. And that’s a good thing. That’s the type of mistake that we want to look for when we’re checking. So hopefully you can see that the sentence should look like this. However each job has different characteristics. Possibly a comma. And the factors which make people feel content. Also different. So the subject verb agreement was wrong and the word order was wrong and arguably were missing a comma as well. That can be the difference between two bands so easily fixed so quickly fixed. Notice we also have the same word repeated different and different. This is the type of thing which I didn’t wouldn’t really want you to focus on when checking your essay. We mentioned earlier in the course that if you struggle to find a way to paraphrase a word if you struggle to find a synonym then I recommend underlining that expression and coming back to it at the end if you have time. If that’s the case then fine. You can try and find another way to paraphrase it but it’s this sort of mistake is harder to fix it’s harder and takes longer to correct. And so I recommend not focussing your time on this type of issue. There are other things that we need to avoid focussing on when checking as well. So as we’re going to look at here what not to check when checking your work natural English. Again this is something that’s quite hard to perfekt it’s quite hard to master and it’s certainly hard to fix when you’re not doing it correctly so don’t want you to focus on that as we just mentioned synonyms in paraphrasing unless they’re underlined and really easy to find and really easy to fix I would avoid focussing on that. The structure of your response. It would take too long to change how strong your arguments are again. They would take too long to strengthen and tenses mostly future anyway. They’re quite hard to find and correct and when it’s done when we’re talking about the future sometimes it’s quite hard to tell which future we should be in any way. So it’s not a dramatic and obvious error to make usually as I say these elements usually take too long to find and fix. If you think you can fix them instantly then by all means go ahead but otherwise accept them as they are and look for areas which you can fix very quickly small easily fixable ground. OK grammar punctuation errors. This is what you want to focus on and that’s what we’re going to look at here. What to check when checking your work article usage. Very easy to include an article to cross out an article and so forth. Singular Plural slash countable uncountable forms. Again a lot of the time is just about including an S on the end of a word prepositions. Maybe not so easy to notice but certainly easy to correct punctuation. Things like a pasture fees missing unnecessary kamaz capital letters go back to the lecture and punctuation. If you feel like you need a little bit more help in this regard. Subject verb agreements. This is the difference between he have and he has. Spelling mistakes again sometimes hard to find because you’ve made the mistake in the first place but when you’re checking it again you may be more focussed and you may notice what’s gone wrong. And again these are the type of mistakes that can be corrected very quickly. You just cross and letter add a letter so forth word Class A word formation issues and word order or missing word issues quite quickly you can add a word in or switch them around with some arrows. The above elements can usually be very quickly fixed meaning you can fix many things in a short amount of time. This is much more likely to boost your score than dwelling on long and difficult to correct mistakes. So here we have an exercise where I want you to think about checking the paragraph to see if you can find all of the mistakes. Every mistake that I want you to focus on is of the type listed on the previous slide on what to check when checking to Here’s the paragraph. So I want you to pause the video here see if you can find all the mistakes and come back when you’re ready. Now first of all we’re going to think about what we’re not focussing on what we’re not checking. Notice what is not being checked. Some of the language here is not very natural English things like break the relationship. It’s not very natural. We’ve got some repetition at times but again you know this is hard to find and harder to correct hard as this sort so we’re not going to focus on that either. Arguably the paragraph could be a little bit stronger. It could be a little bit better structured but we’re not going to focus on these things because they take too long to correct. But now we can think about what is being checked and see if you have the same. Okay so have a look. Here you can see what we have corrected in all of that. N is all colour coded back to the previous types of corrections. We want to focus on so on the one hand comma. We always need a comma after a cohesive device like this one. Those who believe teenage conflict is damaging would argue that it can break the relationship between parents and children. This happened becomes this happens. Subject verb agreement because during conflict here we’re looking at an uncountable form of the word conflict. Hurtful words can be thrown about which can cause tension. Spelling mistake there we needed an ass animosity and distrust. For example if adolescents want to get tattooed we are missing a word here so we needed the two. Most parents would not agree with this proposition was incorrect and the article inevitable conflict might lead teenagers. Again you’ve got discountable uncountable now and it’s also a case of word formation as well. We had teenaged the adjective we need teenager teenagers the noun to get the tattoos made behind their parents backs. Notice that punctuation issue. Parents needed to be possessive. So we added an apostrophe. In contrast these lies again that singular plural issue. We had this it needs to be a plural. So these lies might be avoided if parents are so against subject verb agreement. Willing to have discussions with their children children is already in the plural form so we don’t add an S as a result. Family members will feel satisfied and trust will be built trust uncountable. So we don’t use an article. Okay those are the types of things I want you to look for at the end of your essay that will enable your score to be boosted from I don’t know lacher about 5 5 5 5 or 6 potentially not just half a bag but maybe even a whole band up towards a 7 or more so I hope this section of the course has been useful for you and you now feel you have a better understanding and command of the grammatical range and accuracy. See if you can take it into your next exam and in the next section we’re going to conclude everything we’ve thought about here with just a few more tips and bits and pieces of advice so I’ll see you in the next section.