Textspeak

Click here for the Guardian article on text message poetry, or simply enjoy the beauty of David Crystal on It's Only A Theory:

Precise Expressions

Two online resources we looked at in today's session:

Manchester Academic Phrasebank
Oxford Collocations Dictionary

For those of you with technical queries about using MS Word, there are plenty of online tutorial videos available.  Search for MS Word footnotes or double spacing on Youtube and then choose a narrator whose voice doesn't send you to sleep...

I'm not sure if the following meetings the criteria set out above:

How to Create a Bibliography in Microsoft Word -- powered by ehow

Clarity

Can you rewrite the sentences below in order to remove any possible ambiguity:

1. The burglar was about 30 years old, white, 5' 10", with wavy hair weighing about 150 pounds.

2. The family lawyer will read the will tomorrow at the residence of Mr. Hannon, who died June 19 to accommodate his relatives.

3. Mrs. Shirley Baxter, who went deer hunting with her husband, is very proud that she was able to shoot a fine buck as well as her husband.

4. We spent most of our time sitting on the back porch watching the cows playing Scrabble and reading.

5. Hunting can also be dangerous, as in the case of pygmies hunting elephants armed only with spears.

Hits from the Blog

For anyone struggling for blog inspiration, or for anyone brave enough to start reading other students' blogs and leaving comments (go on, you know you want to), the four blogs linked to below are all interesting and successful (so far) for different reasons.  Please have a browse and leave some nice feedback for these very praiseworthy writers:

http://sjmackiewritingskillsblog.blogspot.com/
http://alex-writingskills.blogspot.com/
http://jtrolljagarn.blogspot.com/
http://avaswritingexperience.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, a £1 record token goes to anyone who can identify the reference in the title of this blog post. Anyone?

Argumentation

I don't seem to be able to embed this video, so you'll have to click on the image of Marlon Brando to be redirected to his delivery of Marc Anthony's speech from the 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Following on from the class debate on whether or not the University of Essex is justified in charging students fees of £9000 per year from 2012 onwards, you may be interested in reading this article from the Guardian, this from the Telegraph, or Jules Pretty's justification of Essex University's decision. 


Finally, I just wanted to record on this blog the criteria for a good argument that our neutrals devised in class today.  They decided that to deliver an effective argument, the following ingredients are essential:1.Clarity of expression; 2.Focus / clarity of argumentation; 3. Explanation and support; 4. Good behaviour.

Some suggestions for blog posts

You're welcome to write about anything at all in your blogs, but over the course of the Writing Skills module, we'll be hoping to see evidence of self-reflection through your thoughts on your own writing and academic skills.  I will post some questions from time to time, and I'll also make suggestions for blog topics in my comments on your blogs, but here are a few prompts to start you off (if you haven't already done so):

- what, in your opinion, are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
- what do you expect to gain from completing the Writing Skills module?
- what kind of texts do you feel confident about writing?
- how confident do you feel about completing written assignments for your university studies?  Do you expect university writing to be different to anything else you've done before?  If so, in what way do you think writing tasks might be different at university?
- is there a particular writer whose style you admire?  Who is the writer?  Can you identify what it is about their style that you particularly like? Do you think that you can learn to write in a similar style?
- what advice have you been given on writing style in the past?  Do you think that this was good advice?

Jane Eyre on the silver (and murky grey) screen

I love the fact that the first comment under this film on Youtube described it as "the strangest adaptation of Jane Eyre I've ever seen":



Fast forward to 2011:



...and back again to 1949: