My critique about summary: myanonymsumary

Hello to all my dear readers,

Today I will do something funny and entertaining. I chose a text, which we had to write for English class, from an anonymous person and I will try t give constructive critique on it. I just hope that my summary is okay because otherwise I will be in trouble. After you finish reading feel free to tell me your opinion on both the original text and my “correction” of it. :)

anonymous text:

Europe already has one foot in ‘Japanese” deflation grave

“The debt deflation theory” by professor Irving Fisher would take EU authorities far in the

battle against rising debt. As the American Revolution has shown, deflation is an

underestimated danger with the potential to lead to economic disaster. If total debt grows too

high, as happens in Western Europe, deflation gets mortal. The eurostat index depicts that

deflation has dropped. The tendency of falling prices is seen in many countries. Similar to

Japan’s crisis, the eurozone economy is in endangered by high debt ratios and sustained

deflation. Zsolt Darvas from the Brussels think tank Bruegel equates deflation with bleakness.

He accuses the European approach of the debt crisis and mentions the dilemma of states being

pushed to “internal devaluations”. Vicious dynamics such as the “denominator effect” are

witnessed in countries like Italy, where debt rises faster than GDP. The same is true for private

debt, where with crash diets for erred states, economic self destruction was only enhanced.

For Mr Darvas, let inflation elevate means escaping from the deflationary spiral. Responsible

for money shifting to Germany is the ECB and non counteracting member states which fear

Germany would leave the eurozone. Europe hope for global growth to fight the deflation

virus.

The first problem I noticed was that the very first sentence is missing. Normally you would write where and when the article was published and who wrote it. In my opinion, the author of this summary also included unnecessary information such as the reference to the American Revolution. Other than that I am not quite sure whether the summary is really easier than the original article. Of course most of the complicated vocabulary was left out but due to the complicated structure of the sentences the whole text was rather confusing. I don`t think that those are the biggest problems because when I read the text for the first time I didn’t understand anything but what shocked me a little bit were the spelling mistakes. From time to time the author forgot to add an “s” to the verb in the third form singular. Some words were spelled wrong and I am not sure but I think that usage of mortal in the phrase “deflation gets mortal” wrong is. I don`t want to mention every little mistake but I highlighted the ones I immediately noticed.

How to study vocabulary in a funny way ;)

Dear all,

as some of you may know I had an English exam not too long ago. Actually, it was really hard and we had to study a lot for it. I studied about 600 words from the Porter Vocabulary Book and I was devastated because I couldn´t remember them until before the exam. However, one of my English professors showed us an entertaining and interesting method to study those words through a simple game. For this game you need a group of people a pen and paper. When the game starts every player has to write down one sentence including one of the words you have to study. Then you hand the piece of paper to the person next to you and this person has to draw a picture to your sentence. The next step is to hand the papers to the next person who sees the picture and has to write down a fitting sentence. You repeat this actions until no blank paper is left and afterwards read the sentences out loud.

It is extremely funny and you will remember the original, hopefully, correct example sentences for the word in question. Try the game and have fun :)


Here is an example for you:

What I learned...

Hey guys!

Last week I got my first corrected English homework from Hendrik back. To be honest, I was really unhappy with the outcome. I was sure, that the text was rather good but now I know better.

After going over the corrected text at home, I understand my mistakes and know how to improve, not only myself, but also my writing style. The most prominent problem was the lack of cohesion in my text. For me it was difficult to answer about 20 questions in a cohesive way. I tried my best but failed because I wanted to answer every question individually. While trying to improve my text I found a way to answer several questions in a more complex sentence. Another of my problems was that I used the wrong vocabulary to answer the questions, or from time to time, I even used quite a German way to write my answers. I tried to remodel my text and used texts, written by native Speakers, as reference material, to improve my style. At the end I asked my sister to read through both texts and tell me which one is easier to follow and understand logically.

I hope my rewritten version is better and that the rewriting helped me to improve my writing skill.