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Showing posts with the label academic

How to ensure that First Year @ University is a success

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Logic of Failure - Metaphysics of Success Many universities are concerned about failure rates. It is not uncommon for 25% of students to fail to complete their first year successfully.  Academics are mildy irritated that they are constantly under pressure from the management to improve success rates. Rather cruel responses might run like this: " I'm sorry, it is really beyond my control if you break up with your girlfriend in week 3 and stop attending classes." [But depression is a REAL problem for some students. Check out this article: Yes, you can crawl out of your first-year depression at university  | Nell Frizzell ] "Am I responsible if you lose the power of motion because you've been living on nothing but porridge oats for the last term before the exams, having spent your parents' money on beer." "I can recommend counselling services. Remember ... you are now deemed to be an adult; you will be expected to take responsibi

The Discourse of Literature Reviews and Critical Evaluation

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A Traditional Card Catalogue Critical evaluations and literature reviews employ an academic discourse. I've started to compose a list of the most frequently used words and phrases : Accentuated differences Acclaimed authors According to Account Acknowledge the issue Addresses Addresses the contradictions Adequate Adopts Advances the idea Almost all Analyses Arbitrary categories Argues Argument Assesses Attempts to challenge Bogged down Bold Breaks new ground Brief discussion Brings together By ignoring this Care with which Centres on Certain types of Challenges Charts Cited Combines analyses of Comments on Compelling argument Comprehensive Conceptual framework Concise Confesses Confides Connects Considered Contains Contradictions Contributors Trinity Library Dublin Conveys the sense Convincing Covers a range of topics Critics Debates about Dense literature Describes the

List of frequently used academic words

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Have you heard of corpus linguistics ?  Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora (samples) collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference. How did it all start? A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967). This work was based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of about a million words, drawn from a wide variety of sources in current  American English How did technology help? The first computerized corpus of one million words of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project. This effort inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area The analysis of academic writing shows that there are many  frequently used words and phrases : a form of    

27 tips on academic writing and publishing

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The path to publication is arduous! "Publication is a self-invasion of privacy." - - -  Marshall McLuhan You can't publish unless you've written something ... 1. Ban thoughts of failure or rejection; by starting to write you are improving on the blank page of terror 2. Write a rough draft quickly; the quality of the writing should be worked on later 3. Familiarise yourself with an appropriate academic phrasebank 4. Learn to use a range of connectives in order to make your ideas flow 5. Avoid writing marathons - they seldom produce quality outcomes 6. Learn to use short stretches of highly focused writing time 7. Check that your have displaced all potential distractions 8. Identify SMART targets for your short periods of writing: Specific – target a specific area for improvement. Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress. Assignable – specify who will do it. Realistic – state what results can realistically

7 steps to Prolific, or more Productive Writing

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Most writers and intrigued by the idea that they might be more productive. Some writers want to become prolific. Some writers, such as Shakespeare, were able to churn out two or more major works every year; others, such as Charles Dickens or Walter Scott, astonish us by the sheer quantity of their work. I was surprised to discover recently that my writing notebook lists plans for 23 books. Clearly some of these projects are little more than a title and an outline. So the problem is not having ideas, it’s more a question of having the time, the discipline and the confidence to see them through to completion as published works. In short, I am now trying to increase my productivity by researching some of the recurring ideas typically adopted by successful writers. While doing some research recently on translations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata , I cam across the impressive productivity of JackLindsay , who produced 170 creative and non-fiction works during his long career.

Sentence Connection and Transition: a bibliography

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Today I am sharing the FURTHER READING list published in my book The Art of Connection: the Social Life of Sentences (Quibble Academic 2013): Amidon, Arlene. "Children's understanding of sentences with contingent relations: Why are temporal and conditional connectives so difficult?" Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 22.3 (1976): 423-437. Astington, Janet Wilde, Janette Pelletier, and Bruce Homer. "Theory of mind and epistemological development: The relation between children's second-order false-belief understanding and their ability to reason about evidence." New Ideas in Psychology 20.2 (2002): 131-144. Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer . Vintage, 2011. Baker, Linda. "Comprehension monitoring: Identifying and coping with text confusions." Journal of Literacy Research 11.4 (1979): 365-374. Bates, Elisabeth, Philip S. Dale, and Donna Thal. &quo