On Writing Essays

If you're thinking of going to university, and writing essays about ideas, then you should read https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/how-to-write-undergraduate-essays .

No, really, read it and do the things he says.

Matha's Vineyard from Martha's Vineyard

The local newspaper from Martha's Vineyard reflect on Labov's seminal study there:


http://www.mvtimes.com/2011/08/16/50-years-language-study-began-marthas-vineyard-6918/


Labov's a sound writer, and you can read the original study here:


http://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/LabovVineyard.pdf

Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design

The idea of 'visual hierarchy' is much more useful when writing about graphology than saying 'it's bold so it stands out/catches the eye'. That's true, but looking at the relative 'boldness' of the text section compared to all the other text, and the choice of *how* it's made bold (alone with other aspects of meaning like the emotional value related to a colour choice, for example), gives you much more to say.

Graphology should be linked to other features of language given greater weight by the exam board -- especially discourse structure: the organisation of the text including reading order and evaluation of importance.

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/understanding-visual-hierarchy-in-web-design--webdesign-84

The Spread of London accents

Dialect change happening now in the UK. Funny how we all live on the south coast but speak a lot like people around the London region...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/05/26/revealed-how-london-accents-have-killed-off-local-dialects-acros/

Dicitonary.com blog

Via A2 student Emily, here's a reminder of the excellent http://blog.dictionary.com/ which contains regular tidbits about language history and change. Great reading for A2 students doing Language Change and Variation.

Lexical map of the brain

Fascinating article found by A2 student Aimee with some great visualisations of how certain words and concepts seem to map to particular regions of the cortex:


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/27/brain-atlas-showing-how-words-are-organised-neuroscience#img-1

Words that were invented by mistake

A little video in those words that were 'back-formed' -- produced by misunderstanding of their morphology.

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/words-that-were-invented-because-we-actually-just-got-t-1771890009

Timeline & A Street through Time

From the Making-Revision-Fun department, two suggestions for ways to ground your sense of historical context.


The first we played in class: the Timeline series of card games, which test your grasp of the relative order in which key historical events happened. you can get themed packs and even mix them up; in class we used the green and red packs ('Diversity' and 'Historical events'). Play solitaire or with a study buddy.


The second is from A2 student Emily, who suggested this beautifully illustrated book tracking the appearance of a street through time. Others in the series look at cities, farms, and so on too. You can get hold of these very cheaply!

The history of English can be explained in five words - Quartz

Not a bad selection -- compresses some key points of the story nicely.

http://qz.com/627204/a-history-of-english-in-five-words/

Developing children's handwriting

It's useful to look at the strategies teachers use, and the terminology they employ, in helping children develop their handwriting skills. This government document gives an example guide.

http://www.foundationyears.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Gateway-to-Writing-Developing-handwriting.pdf

Letter forms and abbreviations - The University of Nottingham

This site collects some useful info about early letterforms and abbreviations, with examples and terminology.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/medievaldocuments/letterformsandabbreviations.aspx

Joos' Five Clocks

We looked today at Martin Joos' five-part system for analysing the register of a text, beyond just formal/informal, but instead classifying texts (or elements of texts, as we saw), along a five-position scale.


this article gives some further discussion of Joos' system., and lays out a helpful table of the five clocks against four features of texts. it includes some more examples and features that help identify the five clocks at work.


http://ww2.odu.edu/al/jpbroder/jpb_on_joos_1976.pdf