Class Six, Adjectives and Adverbs, a promotional writing style

Reading About India:

This week, after the vacation, you were all prepared to correct your Midterm articles. Unfortunately, I was not. So, we will correct them next week.

However, there was no time to waste, so we went on to look at some “commercial” literature, that is a guide book entry about travelling in India. At first we identified COLLOCATIONS (some extra exercises are here: http://www.anglaisfacile.com/cours_anglais/collocation-english , http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/collocations-lists.htm, among others) comprised of adjectives and nouns, or adverbs-adjectives and nouns.

You should have noticed that there are many more adjectives in a “promotional” type of text rather than in a journalistic, “neutral” or formal type of text.

I then asked you to write several sentences using the same expressions as in the photocopied handout to describe Guadaloupe or other “exotic” place.

HOMEWORK:

Use the same sort of “promotional” language and adjective/noun collocations to describe one of the following (your choice). Write a short essay of 150 words, approx.

1) the University of Cergy Pontoise,

2) Your home town or village, or

3) A tourist attraction in the Val d’Oise.

Remember that you are trying to use lots of very specific adjectives to promote the subject. You may also use adverbial expressions like we saw in previous assignments. These give your (positive) opinion about the subject.

Don’t forget to use your spell check and to verify vocabulary in an English ONLY dictionary (such as the American Heritage Dictionary online, via http://dictionary.reference.com/ ). (If you’re interested in an Open Source, very liberal dictionary, see http://www.wordnik.com/)

Your final goal, at the end of the semester is to be able to write an essay of about 150 words on either a journalistic type of subject, or a more opinionated, biased subject. Start preparing yourselves.