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Hi! Hoping some kind folks here can help me (and hoping I'm in the right place). I'm working on essays with a Chinese woman who is studying for the TOEFL. I'm a writer, but I've never been formally trained in teaching English or ESL, so not surprisingly I'm running into some challenges.

1. In a recent sample essay, she was writing about how small her apartment is. She wrote "It's frustrated that my closet is too small for many clothes." I thought she should write that it's "frustrating", but I couldn't explain the reason to her. Is there a rule regarding this use that I can tell her, so she knows when to spot it in the future?

2. On the whole, her essays are very good (better than much of what I saw in my American high school) and she's got the standard format (intro paragraph, 3 in the body, concluding paragraph; each about 3 sentences long) down. But she's worried about time. It's taking her 2 hours to write these sample essays, and she'll only have 30 minutes on the TOEFL. I'm hoping she can pick up her speed with practice, but any other advice? Is it better for her to stick to the standard format and risk only getting it half written? Or should she stop doing the rough draft and just go for it (i.e. is it better to complete the essay and have more grammatical errors in it?)? Or maybe she should cut down her paragraphs to 2 sentences each?

Any advice anybody can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Best,
Brooke
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Brooke123 wrote:
She wrote "It's frustrated that my closet is too small for many clothes." I thought she should write that it's "frustrating", but I couldn't explain the reason to her.

There is a whole set of words like this. Some of the other words in this category include:
embarrassed/embarrasing; tired/tiring; amazed/amazing; disgusted/disgusting; confused/confusing; astonished/astonishing; excited/exciting (and you get the idea)

I tell my students that the -ed form tells how a person feels. (I'm embarrassed. She's tired.), while the -ing form tells what made the person feel that way. (English is confusing; This book is interesting; This picture is disgusting.)

I'm sure someone else will give you the proper explanations . I've usually seen them called "participial adjectives." Here are some on-line quizzes about them, in case they help:

http://fog.ccsf.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/lfr ... iz=partadj
http://www.collegeem.qc.ca/cemdept/anglais/tireding.htm
http://www.better-english.com/grammar/adjing.htm
http://www.collegeem.qc.ca/cemdept/anglais/boredin4.htm
http://www.collegeem.qc.ca/cemdept/anglais/boreding.htm

Exactly what I was thinking, Lorikeet. I would ask her "Who feels frusterated in this sentence?" And when she states that she's the one, I would indicate that she should change the sentence to fit wht she means. She either has to change it to make 'I' the subject, or change 'frustrated' to -ing to make the closet the subject and the 'frustrated' the end result.

"I'm frustrated that my closet is too small for many clothes."
"It's frustrating that my closet is too small for many clothes."