Imagine opening up your local newspaper one day to find the headline: ‘Police Begin Campaign to Run Jaywalkers Down’. What does this mean?
Many students come to the Writing and Communication Centre to see if their writing flows well. Most of the time these students don’t know why, but they feel as though their writing is hard to follow. Here are the top three reasons your work may seem confusing to the reader.
For most of my life, I've been resistant to reading classic novels.
English is an evolving field. The mediums in which it manifests itself have grown numerously and have shown different trends of popularity. In the times of Shakespeare, older prose and plays were very modern, whereas today novels and spoken word poetry seem more prevalent. That might mostly stem from the fact that we live in the Information Age and that expression is the new frontier. Everyone has the ability to create and put their ideas out there into the world. One very modern way of doing so, which has found its way into popular media, is spoken word.
So I’ve been thinking about Google’s Ngram Viewer and how it applies as a teaching tool. Although it doesn’t directly translate, Ngram reminded me of a really handy tool that we use regularly at the Writing Centre. I’ve also realized that many people may not have encountered it before. So, I present to you: the Now Corpus.
At the Writing Centre, we’re always looking out for new teaching strategies and tools. So when one of my colleagues mentioned Google Ngram Viewer (I was shamelessly trolling for blog posts ideas, to be honest), I was intrigued. What is it? What does it do? And more importantly, how does Google keep creating these things?
Grammar is a tricky, uh, thing?
Valentine’s Day is coming up and I’ve been thinking about my relationship
At the beginning of the Fall 2015 term, many first year students wrote the English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPE). The results are now in! If you have not received an email in your UWaterloo email drop box, please contact elpp@uwaterloo.ca. Here are some answers to questions you may have: