Dear Isabelle Kerr,
I am writing to you in addition to your article ‘Twerking, selfie and unlike? Young people don’t speak like that – I should know’. When I read this article, I agreed with every individual point that you made. Being a 16 year old boy in a Secondary School, I am constantly around slang, and from a personal point of view I can clarify that like fashion, trends, or in this case slang, come and go.
Us as a youth, do not want to be remembered as the generation which were known to twerk and take selfies. We want to be remembered for intelligence, not the motion of girls hips. It’s things like this that make older generations portray us as, like you said ‘Yobs’ with the dialect of idiots.
Being around slang constantly, where it gets used every few word, I have seen terms evaporate from our generations speech. I personally don’t remember the last time I heard someone being called ”Butters.” Twerking and selfie came from America and transferred to the UK, they are not even widely used here, so why have they been put in to the Oxford English Dictionary?
One point that i also want to raise is, why haven’t swear words been a new addition to the Dictionary? Not only are the more widely used across the world,but they have stayed in trends, at least for as long as i can remember.
I’d Like to thank you again for raising the awareness and stating the issue of this matter.
From yours sincerely,
Akira Lasharie Sato
January 9, 2015 at 7:50 am
Akira, this is a strong foundation to build from. You have identified some of the main arguments raised by the writer and constructed an appropriate tone in your response.
Next steps:
1) Some of your sentences require restructuring to clarify meaning. For example, your sentence that starts with ‘first of all’.
2) You have missed the occasional words out of sentences and have a few stray capital letters. Proof read your work!
3) You need to develop the points made in the original article in more detail. At the moment, you are only really re-stating what has already been said.
4) I appreciate the joke at the end, however it counters your original argument. If this is going to be successful, you need to create a satirical tone throughout. Otherwise, take it out.
Nice work, Akira. Spend some time re-drafting soon.
January 11, 2015 at 2:08 pm
Akira, this would currenty achieve:
Writing: 27/40 (C)
Reading: 4/10 (E)
February 6, 2015 at 7:31 am
Akira, be careful with some of the discourse markers you are using. ‘In addition to your article’ doesn’t make sense.
Be careful with your pronoun use – ‘Us as a youth’ doesn’t really make sense.
Your response lacks sufficient development of ideas and, while you are responding to some points made, they are limited in number. You need to go deeper with each point.
Check your possessive apostrophes.
You should remember that this is an open letter. Why would people want to read this in addition to the article?