Florence Dujardin's List: Writing

First two chapters from Teaching academic writing: A toolkit for higher education.

Writing Strategies: How to Write in a More Personal and Engaging Tone http://tinyurl.com/4ds7vbu

Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. The authors discuss five major factors that account for most of the variance in texts across grade levels and text categories: word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, causal cohesion, and narrativity. They consider the importance of both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of texts for assigning the right text to the right student at the right time.

This article explores how language is used to build community with the microblogging service, Twitter (www.twitter.com). Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL), a theory of language use in its social context, is employed to analyse the structure and meaning of ‘tweets’ (posts to Twitter) in a corpus of 45,000 tweets collected in the 24 hours after the announcement of Barak Obama’s victory in the 2008 US presidential elections. This analysis examines the evaluative language used to affiliate in tweets. The article shows how a typographic convention, the hashtag, has extended its meaning potential to operate as a linguistic marker referencing the target of evaluation in a tweet (e.g. #Obama). This both renders the language searchable and is used to upscale the call to affiliate with values expressed in the tweet. We are currently witnessing a cultural shift in electronic discourse from online conversation to such searchable talk.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

blogging is only part of the picture, thus to blog or not to blog is only one question early career researchers should be looking at. I believe that early career researchers should engage with a range of social media tools, but for it to be effective it needs to be done strategically. In this post I look at the things to remember when developing your online identity.

This paper investigates the online news gallery as a site for new genres of multimodal news reporting, and the extent to which such galleries may be used as a method of news storytelling. News media websites are now well established and the relative ease with which multimedia can be incorporated into such websites has led us to question the extent to which galleries exploit the semiotic potential of the web to tell stories in new ways, or even to draw on long established traditions like the photo essay. We draw on two (of three) phases of data collection and analysis in this paper: an exploratory survey of a small number of galleries in established online newspapers; and an international survey of English language online newspapers, investigating the uptake of galleries and other multimedia. To tell a story, or not to tell a story: that is the question, and the answer, as online news gallery authors exploit the potential of galleries to varying degrees.

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s expository writing. He proposes three models that constitute an elaboration of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s knowledge-telling model. In Section 3, he describes three running computer programs that simulate the action of the models described in Section 2.

After installing EndNote X, if you still do not see the EndNote X toolbar under the “Add-ins” ribbon on Word 2007, then follow the instructions here.

Here is a high quality sample report which was completed in response to an assignment in Interior Architecture. Read the report and consider how well the students have gathered their information, structured the report and written the text. The report writing checklist that follows contains comments on the report.

Welcome to Writing in Art and Design. Here you will find a range of useful resources to assist you in your study, as well as some excellent examples of student work. Take some time to browse through the site.