Activity Comparing Two Letters Of Application

Link of 2 Letters: Click Here!

1. Don't have too many clauses at the beginning of the sentence.

Explanation: As we can see, in the first letter there a lot of unnecessary words, on the other side in the second letter those words were deleted and some of them were replaces by others. Also we can see in the first letter "Over the past six years, each morning," some words were removed and replaced and also moved in another way as we see in the second letter, "Each morning for the past six years," here we can see that two clauses were changed into one clause.

2. Avoid 'it' as the subject of the sentence. 

Explanation: In letter's you should avoid the word 'it' because your sentece can sound quite weak clause, as we can see in the first letter "It feels so natural to me to be a primary school teacher" this sentence can be modified into a better one like in the second letter, that sound's much better "Being a primary school teacher comes so naturally to me". As we can see in the second letter the sentence sounds, in a way, a stronger clause.

3. Use the right verb tense. (Use present perfect with 'for x amount of time...')

Explanation: If you use the wrong  verb tense in your sentence you can have mistakes, but it's not so bad. For native speakers is natural so normally they do not have mistakes, but in our case, in Chile, lot of students and people have this mistake. ln the first letter "Yet for the past few months" was changed to "Nevertheless for the past few months"  that sounds much better.

4. Use (relative) clauses, such as 'who', 'where', or 'which'.

Explanation: You should always use this words, because we can expand our ideas much better, also you can make clauses in other sentences, as we can see in tip 1.

5. Watch out wordy sentences.

Explanation: You should always watch out wordy sentences, because if this happens your letter are not clear or 'run on'. You always have to fix this problem, a way to do it is clean up with punctuation and parallel constructions.

6. Never start sentence with 'but'.

Explanation: We can't say that starting a sentence is but, just that we shouldn't start a sentence with 'but' for academical purposes.

7. Parallel structures.

Explanation: Parallelisms are sentences or phrases that contain parallel syntactical structures, that means that a noun phrases list is contained or clauses have a similar structure.

8. Use active verbs instead of passive words.

Explanation: We all know that with active words you can make better and stronger clauses that with passive verbs. We can see in the first letter that the clause is very poor "..value would be added value to your organisation by..", but this problem can be fixed just by adding acrtive verbs as it say's the second letter "I would add value to your organisation."