welcome back to Learn Academic English I'm Jenna and I teach intermediate and advanced
level lessons for English learners who want to take their English to the next level in today's
lesson I'm going to talk about how to avoid generalizations first I'll talk about what
generalizations are and why they are a problem and then I'll give you several ways that you can
use to avoid generalizations you can use these in speaking and writing and this lesson will
be useful for you if you use English at work at school or in other situations in which you
have conversations about various topics and you want to make sure that you speak in an
accurate and correct way so let me explain what generalizations are and why they are a problem
so in my class one of the classes I teach I ask my students to talk about life expectancy meaning
the amount of time that the average person lives and one of the things that we learn
is that women typically live longer than men and this is true all around the world so then
we get into a discussion why do women live longer than men when we have this discussion I find that
often my students will say something like this Men drink too much alcohol and women stay home
so the problem with these statements is that they're not entirely accurate and for a college
student to say something like that is a problem one of the things that we should learn in school
is how to use our critical thinking skills to develop more accurate or evidence-based answers
and when we want to talk about a whole group of people we have to be careful because those things
are not true for everyone do all men drink too much alcohol of course not do all women stay home
and just you know do housework of course not so it's important for us to learn how to avoid those
generalizations so that we can speak in a more accurate and correct way and impress people with
our ability to use English to talk about some more difficult or advanced topics before we get into
those strategies for how to avoid generalizations please don't forget to give this video a like if
you find it helpful leave a comment and practice with me below and subscribe if you want more
lessons from a real American English teacher so let's get into those ways to avoid generalizations
first keep in mind that when you use a plural noun like men or women or Americans you're referring
to the whole group of people and you have to be careful because probably there is not something
that you're going to be able to say that's true for all people in that group so that's the first
thing you want to keep in mind when you talk about men are you referring to all men or only
some men or many men so be careful with those plural nouns we should also avoid words like
always or never or all because that's probably not going to be true for all all the people or
it's not going to be true always for example if we say women always stay home and do housework that's
not true so we need to be careful with those words next you want to think about how true it
is for that group of people that you're talking about so let's go back to my previous example
Men drink too much alcohol this is definitely not true of all men but is it perhaps true of some men
yes now we might want to do some research and find out just how true that is but we need to
think about how true it is for the group that we're talking about and then we can make some
decisions about how to state it in a more accurate way okay so besides avoiding using just the plural
noun Men drink too much alcohol or women always do housework we can use some quantifiers to help
us be more specific we can use words like some many or a lot of and keep in mind that a lot of
and many is more than some we might say some men drink too much alcohol while many women do not
drink at all so again is it true for all men no is that true for all women no but we used the words
some and many to help us be more accurate we can use adverbs like in general generally or typically
for example in general Men drink more alcohol than women while In some cultures women typically
never drink so here are those words in general and typically allow us to talk about the whole
group but we know that it's not true for everyone we can use other adverbs like usually often or
sometimes to show that that sometimes or usually or often happens but not always men usually drink
more alcohol than women so is that always true no next we can use some verbs to help us avoid
generalizations the main one that we often do for this is the modal verb may and when we use may
it indicates that it may be true but it is not always true for example men may drink too much
alcohol so maybe that happens also the verbs tend to and be likely to this means that it's
a general direction but it's not always true for example men tend to drink more alcohol than women
so it's not always true but if we look at men in general they tend to they usually drink more
alcohol than women women are likely to drink less or women are less likely to drink alcohol
finally another way that we can avoid generalizations is when we are comparing two
things we can use words that help us compare for example men often drink more alcohol than women
and women typically drink less alcohol than men so words like more less fewer or an adjective
like faster or slower those are words that we can use to compare things and that helps us to
be more accurate so let's go back and look at that original question and let's answer
it just in a short way and let's see if we can avoid generalizations by using the methods that
I showed you remember the question why do women typically live longer than men now notice that
even in the question I avoided a generalization because not all women live longer than men but
if we look at women in general that is generally true so here's a sentence that is not good men
drink too much alcohol while women stay home and do housework okay let's avoid generalizations we
can use the word some some men drink too much alcohol while in many cultures women stay home
and do more housework so again notice that I'm using words like some a lot of and I'm
using comparative words like more to show that women may do more housework than men
or we could say men tend to drink more alcohol than women is this true yes it is because I'm
using the word tend to to show that it's not true for everyone but if we look at the group
it's more common in men and I use the word more alcohol which also helps me to compare and that
is also true that they drink more alcohol than women in some cultures women are more likely to
stay home and do housework while men often do more dangerous jobs so here we're using
a few methods to avoid generalizations and it helps us to write an accurate sentence
so let's practice I'm going to ask you what are some cultural differences between your culture and
the United States so let's throw out some ideas and we can see how we can avoid generalizations
for example Americans typically eat more fast food so this is not true for all Americans I don't
eat a lot of fast food but Americans typically eat more fast food than people in your culture
many Americans live far away from their families
but in your culture more people live closer to their families
or Some Americans value independence more than people in other cultures
Americans tend to value independence more than other cultures
so I hope this lesson helped you to learn how to avoid generalizations as I mentioned before this
is really really important in school and work it's important because if people are going to
take you seriously you need to make sure that the things that you say are accurate and there
are many ways that we can do that in English if you have questions please be sure to let me know
and don't forget that you can practice with me in the comments below check the description box
where I have left a question for you that you can use to practice and don't forget to give
this video a like if you found it helpful I hope to see you back here again soon take care