miércoles, 26 de enero de 2011

Reducing Sentence Exercises


Schenker, in her article “Smart House”, houses will be networked making people’s life easier and more comfortable. The electronic devices will be connected to internet and have special chips to control housework, communications, shopping, bills or people social life. The disadvantages of having a networked house do not seem to be significant. People will just have to pay some extra dollars for the chips, the connection to internet and the security to protect the system against pirating. The maintenance will not have to be afforded because the service will repair themselves. The author concludes that the money that people will not mean much considering benefits of having a smart house.

Exercise
Monica has sent her summary to the evaluative committee of the magazine “TESOL Quarterly” to be considered for future publication. However, it was sent because the word limit was 115. Help Monica to reduce it and fulfill the demands of the audience to be accepted.

(1)   This study went through 1,600 marginal and end comments written on 110 drafts of essays by 47 university ESL advanced students, considering the pragmatic goals and the linguistic features of each comment. (2) Drafts of each individual essay were examined to observe the influence of the first draft commentary on the students’ revisions and asses the changes that were made in response to the teacher’s feedback improved the essays. (3) A significant proportion of the comments led to substantive student revision, and there were particular types of commentary that were more helpful than others. (4) The final results are suggestive of several important implications for L2 writing instruction and future studies on a vital neglected topic.

4 comentarios:

  1. These exercises about reducing sentences are good. The elimination of intensifiers, determiners, etc are done properly. The girl has concluded the reduction of the sentences in a adecuate way without altering the meaning of it.

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  2. The sentence reduction strategies were applied adequately. However, it would be good if you put the number of words of each article, so we can identify how many words you deleted.

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  3. The Schenker one is a little incoherent: in line 1 the two first phrases are like:(?), I mean, you have to put a colon (:) after "smart house". You deleted a lot of words very well, you could've transformed that (do not seem) to an (are not)... in the 5th sentence you could pass it to active voice. And the final sentence is incoherent :(
    As for Monica, sentence 2, apart from being too long, has an incoherent phrase at the end.

    In short, it was very good, impressive actually! You shortened properly, deleted, ommited and changed the structures... To me, it is very OK. :)

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  4. Dear Fabiola,
    Schenker... "says", or you can also use "states". But word deletion was great.

    Good job.

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