Dear FCE student,

Over the years that we've been running Flo-Joe we've had many requests from exam students asking us if we can mark their written work. It's always pained us that we've had to say no, especially as we KNOW how important feedback is as part of your exam preparation.

After all, it's perfectly natural to want guidance and reassurance on questions like these:

Am I on track?
How can I stop making the usual mistakes?
How far does my writing meet the exam criteria?

For a while we thought about how we could meet this need. And we came up with a solution. We've decided to offer a paid-for Critique and Correction service, but to a limited number of people and only for a trial period. We're restricting this service to Exam Success Plus customers only. We think that's a good idea because a) you know us and hopefully like our resources and b) you're serious about your studies.

By studying our weekly writing tasks and writing criteria, you'll know there are several boxes you need to tick to get that top grade you're after.

Here's what you have to do:

• answer the question fully ✔
• organise the work clearly and logically ✔
• adopt the correct level of formality ✔
• use an appropriate range of vocabulary ✔
• use accurate English ✔
• create a positive effect on the target reader. ✔

However, if you're working alone without the support of an experienced, qualified tutor, getting a measure of how well your writing meets these criteria is difficult. If you find yourself in this situation, our Critique and Correction service could be just what you're looking for.

As you know, there are 13 writing tasks in a complete Series of FCE Exam Success Plus. You can choose to sign up for Critique and Corrections of 1 task, 3 tasks or the full 13-task service.

For our 1 or 3-task service you choose the writing task(s) you wish to try from the Exam Success Plus Series you are subscribed to and email us your finished pieces of work. The 13-task Writing Critique and Correction service will allow you to have every writing task in Exam Success Plus critiqued and corrected.

We advise you to send each piece of writing to us separately. This will allow you to learn from and repair any problems with your writing before submitting your next piece to us.

We will then email you:

• your writing returned with the type of errors highlighted (WO: Word Order, WT: Wrong Tense, etc.). This will give you a chance to correct your mistakes before we correct them for you - a good learning opportunity!

• a copy of your writing with all mistakes corrected

• advice on which areas of English you need to practice, categorised as language you 'must' revise, language you 'should' revise and language you 'could' revise.

• feedback based on the FCE writing criteria including
  Content, Communicative Achievement, Organisation and Language.

Please note: we do not grade your work A, B, C etc. as this is something that can only be done legitimately under examination conditions by a team of assessors. However, we will be able to tell you whether we think your work is of the standard we would expect from a student working towards the FCE examination.

Click the image or link below to see an example of what you will receive. This is a PDF file.

We think it's very important that you learn from your mistakes. And for this to happen you need to invest a little time on the feedback you receive from us. To help you do this we suggest you take the following approach when you receive our reply:

• Read our feedback based on the FCE Writing criteria for a general overview of your progress.
• Read our feedback on the areas of English we feel you need to improve.
• Look through the marked up but uncorrected version of your work and try to self-correct the mistakes yourself before finally,
• reading through the corrected piece of work and comparing our suggestions to your own self-corrections.

Working in this way will give you a second chance to 'get it right' before looking at our corrected version.

AND ... with the awareness of the areas of English you need to improve, you can focus on this when doing your next piece of writing.

Best wishes,

Peter Travis
Co-Founder of Flo-Joe

P.S. Just remember: with motivation to go the extra mile, exam success can be yours!

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