Picturing Metaphors for Reading

This one's a bit long, but it's a great example of an academic paper and uses Lakoff & Johnson's metaphor theory, which I know some A2s use for their research. 

It explores people's (drawn) metaphors for the process of reading, at home and at school; so it's telling about education as well as people's engagement with language.

The Believing Body
http://www.theillustratedprofessor.com/?p=3801

11 Weirdly Spelled Words

Phonology and history, in one orthographic package.

11 Weirdly Spelled Words—And How They Got That Way
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/151416

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Google Ngram Viewer

The Ngrams web viewer has been updated. This amazing tool allows you to search for word frequencies in Google Books' huge archive of digitised text. You can choose British or American English, choose what period of English you're interested in, and search for several terms which will appear as different coloured frequency lines on the same graph.

New to the search engine is the ability to search by part of speech (word class), as well as other special functions as explained in the link below. They've updated the data to 2012 as well — but you can still find the old 2009 data. Choose your preferred data set from the drop down menu.

There's lots more advice and tips in the blog post:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/info

Reinventing the book with Shakespeare

Ebooks can become rich collections of resources incorporating text-crunching computation. Here's an example using Shakespeare texts. 

Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/why-a-17th-century-text-is-the-perfect-starting-point-for-reinventing-the-book/263034/

The Britishisation of American English.

Usually it's the other way round... but this article tracks some UK words and phrases that have entered into American usage. Bonus points for use of Google's Ngrams viewer. 

The Britishisation of American English
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19670686

4 Punctuation Marks for Appositives

Okay; this is the sort of thing that gives grammarians a bad name. But if you want to be an effective writer, it's the sort of thing you should take an interest in. 

4 Punctuation Marks for Forming Appositive Phrases
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/4-punctuation-marks-for-forming-appositive-phrases/

Thorn and Wynn

When we do language change at A2, we'll come across some letters that used to be in the alphabet but aren't any more. We met one in our discussion of consonants at AS – the 'eth' symbol used for phonemic voiced 'th'. Here are some more, and the comments discussion is informative too. (Unusually for comments discussions...)

The alphabet used to have other letters -- meet two
http://hotword.dictionary.com/letters-alphabet/

Linguistics Podcast from @linguistchris

iTunes has a number of podcasts about a range of subjects. I'm sure you'll be able to find one at least for each of your A Levels. This one is about linguistics, which means it covers much of what we do in English Language, and a few topics of interest which we don't. 

Linguistics Podcast (@linguistchris) @linguistchris Language Courses

35 Fossil Words

Nice list of English words with a deep history. Save 'em up for when we do Language Change in the A2 year.

35 Fossil Words
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/35-fossil-words/

Kerfuffle is the best word ever.

Proved here by science. 

Words
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/09/words

Copywriting clichés

A copywriter writes advertisements and promotional materials. Here are a few of the cheaper tricks they may use.

No, it won't do. Ten signs a copywriter is on autopilot.
http://weallneedwords.com/andanotherthing/how-to/no-it-wont-do-ten-signs-a-copywriter-is-on-autopilot.html

Welcome 2012

Welcome to new English students.

Have a look around here; you'll find useful links on the right, so click through and see what's there. Of special interest for those with a Facebook account is the English@Park Facebook Page - LIKE it immediately and receive updates, useful messages, and a handy way to contact me in off-hours.

You'll also notice a Twitter feed for @parkenglish lower down the page, and the tags for post topics to help you navigate the blog articles. You can use the Search box if you know what you're looking for.

And before you leave, put your EMAIL ADDRESS in the subscribe box at the top! Then you'll get updates hot and fresh to your inbox.

Enjoy your stay!