Introducing "corpus": a tool for finding language patterns

(The text version of this podcast can be found here.) This podcast summarises the ideas that have been covered in the first seven weeks of the semester so far. Yes, it's about writing, but it's also about  grammar essentially. The grammar we've been talking about is not just about making correct sentences -- everything you do in the text is about grammar: you sequence words in order to make meaning; you choose appropriate words to make meaning.  So the key word of this course is not grammar, but meaning -- how you make meaning with the grammar you've learnt so far.  Hope you're making the best out of the journey, and I'll be with you all the time as you're learning. :)

(The text version of this podcast can be found here.) Over the past week, we explore one of the most important paraphrasing strategies: nominalisation. In this short podcast, I recapitulated some reasons why you should use nominalisation in academic writing -- not just in academic essays, but also when you write professionally when you enter into the workplace.  And you may want to read a related blogpost on what makes academic texts complex. Click here to have a look. Before you go, let me know in the Q&A below what you want me to explain in the next podcast!

This week we finally started writing a summary text using some grammar knowledge to help. As academic writing favours the noun, we talked about shell nouns and superordinate nouns. Also, I manage to have a comment or two on your Week 1 writing task, with three main observations you will find useful for improving your future writing tasks. Have a listen, and the text version can be found here: http://erikthelinguist.com/?p=1531

Time flies, and it's already the end Week 2! Before we proceed to the more specific language patterns of Summary writing, let's wrap up with a review of what we've covered so far. Enjoy your weekend, and see you on Monday!

This short podcast talks about choosing tenses when writing essays, in that you understand more about what tense to use in particular situations and why consistency in tense choice is important.

In this podcast, I wrapped up the first week of the semester, some ideas of which have also been in the previous podcast. I also gave some reflective thoughts about what learning means, and what it takes to be a university student: perseverance, patience and curiosity. The message is therefore not just useful for my students, but for you who strives to be better learners.

Inducted into the course, you might have understood what to expect and to achieve herein. Now we move on to the very question, as to what makes your writing "academic": Is being "academic" a language, a style, or a way to "belong" in a particular community at school? We'll briefly look into this question in this episode, from a grammatical perspective.

This episode marks the start of the podcast series and the semester, and serves to briefly introduce to you social sciences students what the writing course is about. Do listen till the end of this episode, since I have a few questions for you. Enjoy listening and learning!

When reading texts for inspiration on how you can write your own essays, you can be a "detective", examining the language patterns of a large bulk of texts from experts. This text database is called a "corpus", which is available online with very useful search functions. In this episode, I'll give a quick walkthrough of an online corpus tool, and show you how you can find regular patterns of language use in academic writing, those that you can apply in your own!