| Book of the Month | ||
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Advanced Writing with English in Use | |
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Author: Hugh Cory
160 pages.
price: £10.95
ISBN: 0-19-453 26 X
With the exam season approaching once more, it's time to look at some of the books which help candidates through the challenge. The advanced writing papers (CAE 2 & 3) are particularly difficult to prepare students for since essays do not have 'answers' - each essay is supposed to be an individual effort by the candidate who writes it. Also this book aims to be a self-study book and a class book, and a book for students who are not taking the exam but want to improve their writing. This means that there is a risk that the writer will try to satisfy all his different audiences and end up pleasing none of them. Two things help to avoid this - firstly that the CAE exam tests real-life English writing, and secondly, the book has been thoughtfully written. For example, there are exercises that can be done as pair work, but also by a student working alone.
Most of the exercises in this book are designed to be completed in 90 minutes. Part 1 is only a few pages long. It does a good job of describing the exam papers, and also gives the official guidelines for the examiners who will be marking them. However, though the book as a whole is full of useful tips on how to improve your written English this is the only part that deals exclusively with the exam, and it could easily be twice as long. The remainder of the book looks at the type of writing required in the writing exam, and points out that these are also the different kinds of writing that you will have to do in real life. Part 2 looks at the different types of essay (e.g. descriptive, narrative) and part 3 covers the remaining tasks; formal and informal letters, reports and articles, reviews, brochures and information sheets. The end of the book has an answer key and a Task Bank which contains 47 sample writing tasks to provide all the practice anyone could want.
Who is this book for? Anyone who needs a lot of practice with writing, and not just for the exam. It is probably hard to justify asking students to get a copy just for this part of the exam, but it would make a very useful class set. The many tips, collections of useful phrases are combined with exercises that make students genuinely think about the kind of English they are using. This makes this book valuable to any advanced student serious about writing well.
Verdict: More than just an exam preparation book
Assessment 9/10