Today I would like to remind you all of your homework (which you should send to my email adress: rdelapena@eoilaredo.org)

C1 students: you were kindly requested to submit an essay expressing your opinion about the influence of a person’s name. Remember?

B2 crowd: I would like you to write a 250-word recount of a personal experience. Think of some unique anecdote, a funny experience you like to share at parties, etc. Just make it interesting, please. We have learned how to do that, haven't we?

Just remember this:

B2 students: watch out for avoidable mistakes, be careful with those verb patterns: (it prevented them from going to jail), go for natural combinations (a crowd gathered outsider the theater) and use several tenses (although she had been considering other options she ultimately decided to marry Archibald)

C1 learners: you are expected to use natural expressions. For example, if you’re discussing how important a person’s name is you may want to deal with the connection between one thing (the name) and another (their life). Many verbs come to mind: it has an impact on your life or it has an effect on your life. Alternatively, you may say that something makes a difference. Then you can proceed to embellish the expression: it had a great impact on my teenage years, it has quite a powerful effect on...

The speaker in the video I posted two weeks ago said all this: “can our names really influence our personalities?”, “can our names predict our futures?”, “there have been a ton of studies over the years trying to figure out how our names affect our lives”.

Let’s just dwell on that for a second. Check out the verb+noun combinations: influence-personality, affect-life. If you’ve been reading carefully you may have noticed that I have already given you a third collocation “to have an impact on you life”. We know that those combinations are safe because two different competent speakers have used them. The legitimate question might be can I say “it impacted me”? To which the answer is yes. I personally don’t like it (for reasons regarding style) so I never use it but it definitely is used.

Do you have to use those very words? Not necessarily. You can, of course, choose to define the kind of influence/impact something has. Check out these sentences: it has ruined my life, it has boosted the sales, it has limited my chances, it has forced me to come to terms with… etc. That might actually be the true difference between B2 and C1. The B2 speaker is happy not to make a mistake (it has influenced my life). The C1 speaker goes a little bit farther (the media has a powerful effect on people). A C2 speaker might choose from a wider gammut of resources ranging from the evocative (it has become the bane of my existence) to the prosaic (it the most critical factor for securing a job interview). All in all, one thing is clear, we should always aim for natural expressions, i.e. sequences that frequently used. “Grammatically possible” doesn’t cut it anymore.