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emckenna16

Create Your Own Language, for Credit - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-own-language-for-credit.html

language

shared by emckenna16 on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • emckenna16 on 17 Mar 16
     
    Students at Stephen F. Austin State University ask questions that pertain to creating your own language. Big TV shows and movies such as Game of Thrones and Avatar are making creating your own language a popular idea. This article also describes how to create your own language, which includes picturing what your character looks like and how they would speak.
Lisa Stewart

Write a Winning College Essay - Figures of Speech - 20 views

www.figarospeech.com/college-essay

college_essay rhetoric

shared by Lisa Stewart on 06 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Brandon Lau on 03 Sep 13
     
    I really liked how this site took a more technical approach to writing a good college essay. I found this link to be very useful.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Kylie Kam on 05 Sep 13
     
    I really liked how this article gave interesting and thoughtful tips that aren't too common, but seem very helpful.
  • Dylan Combs on 05 Sep 13
     
    This article dispelled many of my misperceptions on writing the college essay. It also had very interesting tips with bold and extreme language. An example of both of these is a tip that said, "Don't Express Yourself,"
  • Natalie Ma on 05 Sep 13
     
    This article was really interesting. It really helped me to think about my college essay and think about the things that I need to change or go back and edit. I really liked the part about your "Hook" and the "Don't Express Yourself" tip. I also really liked how this article gave tips that I have never heard before.
  • Marissa Behrens on 05 Sep 13
     
    Debunked myths about the college essay and broke down how to make your essay "winning." I thought the most important part about this article how the author explained the college essay is meant for the school to examine your character, so make sure to include a revelation or process of learning.
Ryan Catalani

"Not to Put Too Fine a Point Upon It": How Dickens Helped Shape the Lexicon : Word Rout... - 1 views

www.visualthesaurus.com/...3120

dickens new words lexicon vocabulary slang

shared by Ryan Catalani on 05 Feb 12 - No Cached
Lara Cowell liked it
  • Ryan Catalani on 05 Feb 12
     
    "Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."
Ryan Catalani

Picking Brand Names in China Is a Business Itself - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hina-is-a-business-itself.html

shared by Ryan Catalani on 11 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Ryan Catalani on 11 Nov 11
     
    "More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. Western companies looking to bring their products to China face a problem not unlike that of Chinese parents naming a baby boy... And so the art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one. ... Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone's guess. But Denise Sabet, the vice general manager at Labbrand, suggests the reasons include cultural differences and the Chinese reliance on characters for words, rather than a phonetic alphabet. "
Lisa Stewart

Online Japanese Chinese Kanji Character Dictionary - 1 views

www.kanjinetworks.com/index.cfm

etymology Japanese kanji katakana

shared by Lisa Stewart on 09 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Lisa Stewart on 09 Mar 12
     
    A comprehensive, illustrated dictionary with etymologies, pictographs & definitions in English, displaying also Hiragana and Katakana, the Kana used in Nihongo
Lisa Stewart

Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language - 9 views

business.scu.edu/...rhetjcr.htm

wordsrus advertising

shared by Lisa Stewart on 18 Nov 09 - Cached
  • the discipline of rhetoric was the primary repository of Western thinking about persuasion
  • The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute a richer and more systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical structure in advertising language
  • Rhetoricians maintain that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways, and that in any given situation one of these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important
  • a rhetorical figure occurs when an expression deviates from expectation
  • With respect to metaphor, for instance, listeners are aware of conventions with respect to the use of words, one of which might be formulated as, words are generally used to convey one of the lead meanings given in their dictionary entry. A metaphor violates that convention, as in this headline for Johnson & Johnson bandaids, "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," accompanied by a picture of bandaids emblazoned with cartoon characters (from Table 2)
  • listeners know exactly what to do when a speaker violates a convention: they search for a context that will render the violation intelligible. If context permits an inference that the bandaid is particularly strong, or that the world inhabited by children is particularly threatening, then the consumer will achieve an understanding of the advertiser's statement.
  • every figure represents a gap. The figure both points to a translation (the impossibility in this context of translating "Say hello to your child's new petunias" is the key to its incomprehensibility), and denies the adequacy of that translation, thus encouraging further interpretation.
  • metaphors that have become frozen or conventional: e.g., the sports car that "hugs" the road.
  • an important function of rhetorical figures is to motivate the potential reader.
  • Berlyne (1971) found incongruity
  • (deviation) to be among those factors that call to and arrest attention.
  • "pleasure of the text"--the reward that comes from processing a clever arrangement of signs.
  • Berlyne's (1971) argument, based on his research in experimental aesthetics, that incongruity (deviation) can produce a pleasurable degree of arousal.
  • Familiar examples of schematic figures would include rhyme and alliteration, while metaphors and puns would be familiar examples of tropic figures.
  • Schemes can be understood as deviant combinations, as in the headline, "Now Stouffers makes a real fast real mean Lean Cuisine."
  • This headline is excessively regular because of its repetition of sounds and words. It violates the convention that sounds are generally irrelevant to the sense of an utterance, i.e., the expectation held by receivers that the distribution of sounds through an utterance will be essentially unordered except by the grammatical and semantic constraints required to make a well-formed sentence. Soundplay can be used to build up meaning in a wide variety of ways (Ross 1989; van Peer 1986).
  • Many tropes, particularly metaphors and puns effected in a single word, can be understood as deviant selections. Thus, in the Jergens skin care headline (Table 2), "Science you can touch," there is a figurative metaphor, because "touch" does not belong to the set of verbs which can take as their object an abstract collective endeavor such as Science.
  • For example, a rhyme forges extra phonemic links among the headline elements.
  • "Performax protects to the max," the consumer has several encoding possibilities available, including the propositional content, the phonemic equivalence (Performax = max), and the syllable node (other words endin
  • Because they are over-coded, schemes add internal redundancy to advertising messages. Repetition within a text can be expected to enhance recall just as repetition of the entire text does.
  • The memorability of tropes rests on a different mechanism. Because they are under-coded, tropes are incomplete in the sense of lacking closure. Tropes thus invite elaboration by the reader. For example, consider the Ford ad with the headline "Make fun of the road" (Table 2). "Road" is unexpected as a selection from the set of things to mock or belittle. Via
  • This level of the framework distinguishes simple from complex schemes and tropes to yield four rhetorical operations--repetition, reversal, substitution, destabilization.
  • s artful deviation, irregularity, and complexity that explain the effects of a headline such as "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," and not its assignment to the category 'metaphor.'
  • The rhetorical operation of repetition combines multiple instances of some element of the expression without changing the meaning of that element. In advertising we find repetition applied to sounds so as to create the figures of rhyme, chime, and alliteration or assonance (Table 2). Repetition applied to words creates the figures known as anaphora (beginning words), epistrophe (ending words), epanalepsis (beginning and ending) and anadiplosis (ending and beginning). Repetition applied to phrase structure yields the figure of parison, as in K Mart's tagline: "The price you want. The quality you need." A limiting condition is that repeated words not shift their meaning with each repetition (such a shift would create the trope known as antanaclasis, as shown further down in Table 2).
  • the possibility for a second kind of schematic figure, which would be produced via an operation that we have named reversal. Th
  • rhetorical operation of reversal combines within an expression elements that are mirror images of one another.
  • The rhetorical operation of destabilization selects an expression such that the initial context renders its meaning indeterminate. By "indeterminate" we mean that multiple co-existing meanings are made available, no one of which is the final word. Whereas in a trope of substitution, one says something other than what is meant, and relies on the recipient to make the necessary correction, in a trope of destabilization one means more than is said, and relies on the recipient to develop the implications. Tropes of substitution make a switch while tropes of destabilization unsettle.
  • Stern, Barbara B. (1988), "How Does an Ad Mean? Language in Services Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 17 (Summer), 3-14.
  • "Pleasure and Persuasion in Advertising: Rhetorical Irony as a Humor Technique," Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 12, 25-42.
  • Tanaka, Keiko (1992), "The Pun in Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach," Lingua, 87, 91-102.
  • "The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader Response Theory to Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research,
  • Gibbs, Raymond W. (1993), "Process and Products in Making Sense of Tropes," in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed
  • Grice, Herbert P. (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Leigh, James H. (1994), "The Use of Figures of Speech in Print Ad Headlines," Journal of Advertising, 23(June), 17-34.
  • Mitchell, Andrew A. (1983), "Cognitive Processes Initiated by Exposure to Advertising," in Information Processing Research in Advertising, ed. Richard J. Harris, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 13-42.
Alex Cheung

'Some of the More Mundane Moments in Life Make Great Essays' - NYTimes.com - 26 views

thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/...essay

shared by Alex Cheung on 13 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Here’s an essay that’s sure to make an admissions officer reach for the triple grande latte to stay awake
  • “I spent [choose one: a summer vacation/a weekend/three hours]
  • struck by the number of students rhapsodizing about expensive travel or service projects in exotic locales
    • Shermann Alconcel
      Shermann Alconcel on 20 Sep 11
       
      Elaborate and fancy isn't always better than simple and concise
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • On the other hand, Mr. Springall was working at Cornell when an applicant revealed that while waitressing she got angry at a customer and spit in his food before serving it. “Immediate red flag,” Mr. Springall recalled. “She makes poor choices.
    • Alex Cheung
      Alex Cheung on 20 Sep 11
       
      This really exemplified the "fine line" between things, and I'll have to be sure to check my essays to make sure nothing "bad" is revealed, or at least misunderstood.
  • Cedric Char on 14 Sep 11
     
    I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.
  • ...15 more comments...
  • Rachel Marison on 14 Sep 11
     
    I think this is really interesting because I have never really thought about what an admissions officer would be thinking of as he/she reads a really cliché essay. This really makes me want to work harder to come up with less cliché topics and essays.
  • Ian Sekiguchi on 14 Sep 11
     
    I feel like the "bad" example that they used was really effective, because it highlighted the fact that the essay itself says nothing about the writer's character or personality. Instead, that essay talked about the misfortune of others and the worldly possessions of the writer. This makes me really want to focus on writing something that displays my personality/mind.
  • Alison Kamikawa on 14 Sep 11
     
    I thought that this article was very interesting because it made me realize how critical some of the college admission boards are. They won't accept any "cliche" topics such as service projects, however I feel like community service are indeed one of the most important experiences in life that influence people. This makes me think that the colleges examine not so much the grammar or clarity, but more of who stands out among everyone.
  • Kandace Izumi on 14 Sep 11
     
    This article really makes you think of all the experiences to NOT write about in your college essay. I think it's interesting that humbling experiences (such as helping out the less-fortunate) are not always beneficial to you when it comes to college acceptance.
  • Alison Nichols on 14 Sep 11
     
    I think that this is a really helpful article because it helps give a new perspective on what they like and that they think the best essays are the ones that make them laugh or cry instead of the cliché college essay.
  • Cody Lee on 14 Sep 11
     
    I agree with the statement made in this article that it is harder to think of a specific personal experience to write about than actually writing the essay. But this essay also made me realize that you can shape an ordinary story into something interesting and worth reading to boost your chances for admission.
  • Ryan Souza on 14 Sep 11
     
    I think that this article explains in depth what kinds of stories shouldn't be told, which is why it is helpful. For example, the essay where the person wrote about torturing frogs when the mascot is a frog. It shows bad examples and explains why they're not so good, such as not writing about being apologetic or epiphanic.
  • Kellen Hirai on 14 Sep 11
     
    This article made me realize the importance of choosing a good essay topic. The examples that were used in the story effectively showed the importance of choosing a topic that is appropriate and unique at the same time. It also highlighted the importance of the essay, as the article mentions some top students that were denied because of an inappropriate essay topic.
  • Kai Lapschies on 14 Sep 11
     
    This article tells what kinds of things to write about and what not to write about. You can write about something inappropriate if you want but it should include some kind of realization. It should be unique to you even if the story was mundane. It would be best if you try to leave the reader feeling an emotion.
  • Miles Provencher on 15 Sep 11
     
    I'm glad I read this one.... I'd never thought about how many papers admissions counselors have to read... writing concisely and interestingly is much more important than I originally thought.
  • Joshua Chen on 15 Sep 11
     
    I never thought about how something that you have done that is seemingly daily or routine could be something that astounds other people who live a very different lifestyle then you. You also should be careful of giving off the wrong impression when writing about something bad that you did in the past.
  • Griffin Bolan on 15 Sep 11
     
    I got a huge kick out of reading the user comments on this article, my favorite being one who recommended to screw worrying about essays and worry about sports and ethnicity. This article definitely puts your essay into perspective. One out of thousands. There people have seen it all which is why its even more important to be honest.
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 11
     
    This article made me realize that because college admissions offices have read thousands of essays, there's a high chance that someone has already written about what you want to write. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about college essays, is talking about something that will make you look good to the admissions. But what I never thought about before was that it doesn't just have to be something extraordinary, it can be the simplest experience; it just has to be something that is unique to you.
  • Shawna Ciano on 19 Sep 11
     
    I feel like this article stresses how important the college essay it is, and how the topic of your essay can either make or break you, but it doesn't give much advice on what to do. It does give helpful insight on what not to do, but doesn't give any good examples of topics. It was helpful to know how the college admissions directors will be reading the essays to find out who we are.
  • Philip Siu on 19 Sep 11
     
    After reading this article I discovered that it's okay to take take risks and writing about a funny experience, but don't take take it too far as to making your essay controversial or an essay that may offend the school mascot.
  • Kristi Ikeda on 19 Sep 11
     
    I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.
  • Kylie Kam on 05 Sep 13
     
    It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.
jamelynmau16

How the brain listens to literature - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...150211140923.htm

language brain

shared by jamelynmau16 on 22 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • jamelynmau16 on 22 Apr 15
     
    When we listen to stories, we immerse ourselves into the situations described and empathize with the feelings of the characters. Only recently has it become possible to find out how exactly this process works in the brain. Scientists have now succeeded using an fMRI scanner to measure how people listen to a literary story.
Lisa Stewart

Niche Construction - 1 views

lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/...HumanSciences.html

niche_construction language_evolution

shared by Lisa Stewart on 26 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • An important insight from NCT is that acquired characters play an evolutionary role, through transforming selective environments. This is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species appears to have engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices. Such cultural practices are typicaly not themselves biological adaptations (rather, they are the adaptive product of those much more general adaptations, such as the ability to learn, particularily from others, to teach, to use language, and so forth, that underlie human culture) and hence, cannot acurately be described as extended phenotypes (1). Mathematical models reveal that niche construction due to human cultural processes can be even more potent than gene-based niche construction, and establish that cultural niche construction can modify selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events (2-4). There is now little doubt that human cultural niche construction has co-directed human evolution in this manner (5)
Lisa Stewart

Cure writer's block with writing prompts - writing tips character name generator - 4 views

www.languageisavirus.com/home.php

writing poetry niche_construction creativity

shared by Lisa Stewart on 21 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Lisa Stewart on 21 Sep 11
     
    These writing experiments seem like ways to burrow through the language environment that is our niche...
Lara Cowell

How Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement protesters are using their native language to push ba... - 0 views

qz.com/...e-to-push-back-against-beijing

language identity Cantonese Mandarin Chinese resistance Hong Kong

shared by Lara Cowell on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 23 Oct 14
     
    At the heart of the current friction between Hong Kong and mainland China isn't just Hong Kong's autonomy and political freedoms. It's the territory's language. Though they share many of the same Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese use them in such divergent ways-in terms of both grammar and vocabulary-that they constitute two different writing systems. China's government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn't really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong's resistance to the authority of mainland China.
  • Lara Cowell on 23 Oct 14
     
    For more on the historical divide between Mandarin and Cantonese language speakers, see this article: http://www.chinese-lessons.com/cantonese/difficulty.htm
Lara Cowell

Can Google Build A Typeface To Support Every Written Language? - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-for-google-universal-typeface

typeface language Noto Google technology font endangered languages

shared by Lara Cowell on 09 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 09 Aug 14
     
    Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.
awunderlich15

The Hidden Language of Mall Santas | VICE | United States - 1 views

www.vice.com/...en-language-of-mall-santas-124

shared by awunderlich15 on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
Lara Cowell liked it
  • awunderlich15 on 19 Mar 15
     
    In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.
  • Lara Cowell on 19 Mar 15
     
    This article (and the other articles posted in Vice's "Hidden Language" column) lists a sample lexicon of terms that reveal the character of the subculture being studied--some nice examples of professional jargon/insider terminology and the way that professions/social groups shape language.
Lara Cowell

Reading Harry Potter: Carnegie Mellon Researchers Identify Brain Regions That Encode Wo... - 1 views

www.cmu.edu/...computationalreadingmodel.html

brain neuroscience reading Harry Potter

shared by Lara Cowell on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 30 Nov 14
     
    Wednesday, November 26, 2014 By Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 PITTSBURGH-Some people say that reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" taught them the importance of friends, or that easy decisions are seldom right. Carnegie Mellon University scientists used a chapter of that book to learn a different lesson: identifying what different regions of the brain are doing when people read.
Lara Cowell

How to Ask for Help and Actually Get It - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-help-and-actually-get-it.html

help assistance communication

shared by Lara Cowell on 20 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 20 Aug 18
     
    It's an ethos so culturally ingrained in us that it's hard to see beyond: Self-reliance is paramount, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to solve your own problems is a matter of character. Of course, that's not quite how the world works. All of us need help from time to time, and the ability to ask is a learnable skill we seldom think about but one that can have a monumental impact on our goals and lives. So, how to ask? 4 tips: 1. Make sure the person you want to ask realizes you need help. Thanks to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness, we're programmed to have the ability to take in and process only so much information, ignoring the rest. 2. Make a clear request. Otherwise your potential helper might fall victim to audience inhibition, or the fear of "looking foolish in front of other people," which can prevent people from offering help because they doubt their own intuition that you need help. 3. Ge specific with your request and make sure your helper knows why you're specifically asking him or her. This will make them feel invested in your success and actually want to help. 4. Make sure the person you're asking has the time and resources to help.
Lara Cowell

Why My Novel Uses Untranslated Chinese | Literary Hub - 0 views

lithub.com/ovel-uses-untranslated-chinese

language identity perspective literature

shared by Lara Cowell on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 13 Mar 19
     
    Taiwanese-American writer Esme Wang reflects on the untranslated use of other languages in literature which is otherwise written in English. By making the linguistic choice to use untranslated Chinese in a novel geared for an English-reading audience, she hopes her readers will be able to relate to characters, yet also experience the nuances and complexities of inhabiting a space where difficulty in communication is its own kind of trauma.
Lara Cowell

The Power of Wordlessness - 0 views

wp.nyu.edu/...er-of-wordlessness-part-1-of-2

autism language words wordlessness reading comprehension

shared by Lara Cowell on 02 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 02 Nov 18
     
    In this article addressed to teachers, author Julia Csillag cites research on the use of wordless texts to teach students with autism spectrum disorder. Wordless texts can be used to address a variety of skills that autistic students typically struggle with, including diverse literacy skills, cognitive flexibility, and nonverbal communication. Removing words and auditory information also supports autistic students since integrating information from multiple senses can take longer in autistic individuals, particularly if this information is linguistic. Removing words can therefore positively influence processing. Using wordless books or movies can build diverse literacy skills in terms of making inferences, understanding narrative structure, and using evidence to support a claim. All wordless "texts" support individuals' ability to make inferences, which is helpful since research shows that "students with Asperger syndrome…had challenges in making inferences from the text" (Knight & Sartrini, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found that "similar processes contribute to comprehension of narratives across different media" (Kendeou, P. et al, 2009), meaning that addressing visual inferences can transfer to inferences made during reading. Images and silent books or movies necessarily require students to infer what is happening, who the characters are, etc.
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