The English Miscellany

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...

Are you familiar with the terror of the blank page in the exam room? Do you experience a sense of writer's block in this situation? Are you just unsure about your technique in starting an essay? In fact, there are many tried and tested openings that will get your writing off to a confident and winning start. Although there are infinite possible ways of leading into an essay, blog, or news article, there are some common opening gambits that writers rely on (as in a game of chess). After a strong opening you will be ready for a winning middle game. Before outlining the Eight Openings , here are some points to think about: Is your aim to engage the reader by being relevant, creative, and original? Are you trying to arouse curiosity or to meet expectations? Are you explaining what’s on offer (like a menu), or offering a taster session? In a promotional sense you want to encourage the reader to come through the door: to enter your mental world. Some reader...

Further to my recent post examining the effectiveness of software designed to assist with grammar, punctuation, and style, I wanted to find out whether it was possible to score 100% on the grammarly.com software. I tried to test www.grammarly.com by using text taken from their own website. That does not work, however, as they recognize their own work and they have already marked it as 'perfection.' They award themselves 100% for their own work. Is that surprising? Nonetheless, if we select text from www.grammarcheck.net, their text has a variety of errors - according  to www.grammarly.com. Similarly, text taken from the  www.grammarly.com website fares badly when it is tested by www.grammarcheck.net. These results suggest that the software programmes have not managed to create a reliable and universal system that successfully tests and verifies grammar, style and punctuation. Whichever system is used there is a typical 35% reporting of errors in the text submitted. C...

The march of technology into every corner of contemporary education often leads to the harsh judgment that traditional teachers have become - or will soon become - a redundant human resource.  Are the rumours of pedagogic extinction justified? With the perfection of advanced linguistic software, a brave new world of error-free writing has emerged. Machine-generated clarity and precision is leading us to a written world that will be ruthlessly stripped of recurring lapses and common mistakes. Foggy chasms of fatal confusion will be banished from the linguistic ecology of the planet. There will be no more sleepless nights; no more worrying about the comma splice, sentence fragments, and dangling modifiers. Indeed, an inexpensive monthly subscription provides an enticing opportunity to join the new democratic republic of letters - a nation of automated stop-keepers. After all, the technology has now conquered the checking of spelling, grammar and style. Indeed, some of th...