Materials: Guidelines

The main purpose of this sheet is as a useful reference for students who need to refer to necessities (in their business writing). A short discussion activity is also provided for some practice and a chance for you to monitor the sentences the students are producing and make any corrections.

The only important thing that might need to be explained about the different groups of sentences is relative levels of urgency communicated by each one. You could ask students to work together and try to decide for themselves what the order of the words is, or you could just tell them (I know we're not supposed to do that, but I've found that a lot of times it's what my students wanted me to do). Anyway, once the meanings and relative importance levels of the various phrases are understood you can move on to the discussion.

If your students (like mine) are inclined to acquiesce with the prevailing thinking of the group, you may want to ask them to write their ideas as sentences, before they share them with their groups.

You have a choice of two different methods of getting this handout to your printer. It all depends on whether your computer has "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed. If it has, then this would be the recommended method for printing out the worksheet. Try selecting the "PDF (Adobe Acrobat)" link below. If all goes well, a new application window should appear including a print button, which when selected will print out one copy.

If, on the other hand you do not have "Adobe Acrobat" select the "HTML (web page)" link below. (Also, this method is recommended for users of Netscape Navigator, which seems to have trouble interacting with the Acrobat program like this.) If all goes well, a new browser window will open, from which you can either click the "print button" on the toolbar or open the "File" menu, select "Print" and then adjust the "Print Dialog Box" to your own preferences.

The final link below is to enable you to print this "instruction page" if you want to. Click on the link, and when the page appears on a new screen you will be able to print it using the browser's "print button" or "file menu". After printing, close the window again so that you can continue to navigate around the site.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.