Group Work Analysis - EU Citizenship

Group Work Analysis

Comment on "Tackling Crisis"

Tackling crisis

  Europe is in the deflation crisis, which influences the rise of debt. Moreover, the history of mankind has experienced this problem before. Sometimes deflation may be lethal for economy, when debts exceed the margin of 300pc. Generally, in Western Europe inflation is not perfect, 2pc which even deteriorates the case. Denmark is close to finding itself in deflation, so is Sweden.

With a downward shift in inflation, countries like Italy and Spain may be in a ‘’runaway debt’’. In Italy, for example, unemployment is already very high, and private debt there and in other EU members like France, Portugal keeps on rising by more than 100%.

Indeed, most of the countries could still be rescued by boosting inflation rate. Europe would not have to end up with Japanese-style deflation and with a burden of damaged private sector. Hence, the inflation may not fall below 2pc. With flat inflation, close to 0, even a stable country like Germany is at risk. 

 Club Med allies could also unite and demand appropriate action from Germany. By making bilateral decisions countries could achieve more. Hopefully, deflation will leave Europe in short. Global growth is a valid reason to keep waiting, but it is not how responsible economy should behave.

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 Comment on "Tackling Crisis"

As a part of this week’s homework we had to correct a summary written by one of our fellow classmates. The text I chose is called “Tackling crisis” and to my mind, it still requires quite a bit of improving. Firstly, the author forgot to mention the title of the text the summary is based on, the name of the newspaper and the date of publication. The vocabulary used in the text is quite formal but there are still a couple of flaws, namely the use of e.g. “so” and “like”, instead of more formal expressions. Another word that should not be used in a summary is “hopefully” because it conveys the author’s opinion. A summary needs to be objective and therefore you can’t include your personal outlook on the topic.  I also managed to find some minor mistakes such as missing words or the incorrect choice of articles. The biggest flaw of the text, though, is its incoherence. The sentences of almost every paragraph don’t fit together logically and therefore the structure gets very confusing. The first paragraph is especially messy and all of them put together don’t succeed in bringing out the main topic, but create confusion.

How to study vocab

In last week’s class we tried out a new method of memorising academic vocabulary. To my mind, it was incredibly funny and also very useful because it helped me remember at least half of the words we learned of. This is how it worked: Having prepared eight separate pieces of paper, we had to write down a sentence on the top piece, including one new acadamic word. Next we had to pass the stack of paper on to the person to our left, who then had to convert the clause into a picture. The next person in line again had to guess what the drawing could mean as a sentence.  This went on until all the eight cards of every stack were complete.The stack of cards I ended up with looks like this:

What I learned...

After getting back our assigned homework letter I was actually positively surprised. I considered my text to be a mess and was happy to see that I didn’t do as bad as I thought I did. Still, there were a great deal of mistakes that I didn’t spot when proof-reading the text. Correcting them made me aware of what still needs improvement and practice. 

The first thing I learned from revising my homework is that I tend to (for a lack of better words)  beat around the bush. I have difficulty with bringing what I am trying to say to a point.  This might pose a problem for the upcoming exams because it will be difficult for me to adhere to the given word count. However, some other parts of my text lack explanations because I don’t always express what I am tryin to say clearly. Therefore, I made a resolution to firstly try and keep everything that I write rather short and to secondly formulate things more precisely. Concerning grammar, I need to revise the use of commas. Sometimes I am not entirely sure where to put them in a sentence. It is very important to know the rules concerning commas though, simply because the structure of sentences might get confusing if you put commas in the wrong places.

Resources that helped me correct my mistakes are mostly different kinds of corpora like the “Corpora of Global Web Based English” or “COCA” (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) (http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/) as well as my monolingual dictionary. Another online dictionary I like to use is the “Cambridge Dictionary” (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ) simply because it also offers a great deal of helpful example sentences and definitions.