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This is a joint study done by professors at the University of Maryland and University of Washington on students between 4th and 9th grade and the common patterns and relationships found in their writing samples based on style, speed, and legibility.

AI is not completely developed enough to overthrow writers yet. AI is able to produce full paragraphs by comparing and applying similar patterns across Wikipedia pages and other writings found on the Internet. The future of AI writing includes mixed media. For example, creating pictures or videos out of a text prompt. But AI will be seemingly integrated into day-to-day word processors and possibly become the "norm."

The takeaway: one K is bad, two Ks are good and above all else, never, ever use three Ks. 1. "Okay" is obviously the most professional way to type the word, and I will vouch that it is also safe to casually use in text messages. Some disagree that "okay" can sound sarcastic or stern, especially when paired with a period. Which isn't wrong - sentences do invoke a more serious tone when there are periods involved. But the reason why okay is, well, okay, is because it's the longest form of the word. You took the time to type out those additional two letters, and that counts for something. 2. "Kk" is the closest to gotcha. It means message received, roger that. 3. The origins of the dreadful "k" can't exactly be pinpointed, though it's been a thing since iMessage looked like this, so basically the Stone Age. People voiced their disdain for short responses - "k, ok, lol" - on Facebook pages and through memes years ago. and everyone pretty much agreed that yeah, when you type out an extremely long, emotionally charged paragraph to someone and they respond with one letter, it's pretty infuriating. From then on we've been conditioned (or traumatized) to react in a similar manner to the single k. Even when it's just in response to a simple, harmless sentence, it can still feel like a dig.

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. Musicians have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. In contrast, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia, have a harder time hearing sounds amid the din. Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders. Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first. Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language. Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists, who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty. "The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said at the press briefing.

Swearing is a motor activity with a strong emotional content. The brain processes swear words and normal words differently. The brain stores swear words that are "emotionally charged" as whole units. The brain relies on the limbic system, which controls memory, emotion, and behavior, and the basal ganglia, which controls motor functions and impulse control, to process the "swear words".

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. and even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

This article explores how dogs perceive human language and whether tone of voice matters. Through this experiment, it was discovered that dogs respond positively to a positive tone of voice and neutrally to a neutral tone of voice. However, if the dog was reprimanded in a positive tone of voice, the dog would perceive that as a praise. In terms of language evolution, it suggests that the ability to "process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human."

The Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese is a victim of language standardization in schools and offices, urban redevelopment and migration. To the untutored ear, the Beijing dialect can sound like someone talking with a mouthful of marbles, inspiring numerous parodies and viral videos. The dialect is a testament to the city's tumultuous history of invasion and foreign rule. The Mongol Empire ruled China in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Manchus, an ethnic group from northeast Asia, ruled from the mid-17th century into the 20th. As a result, the Beijing dialect contains words derived from both Mongolian and Manchurian. The intervening Ming dynasty, which maintained its first capital in Nanjing for several decades before moving to Beijing, introduced southern speech elements.

What do you get when you cross a mafia mobster with a sociologist? An offer you can't understand. It's an old joke, and you could substitute "sociologist" with just about any other "ologist" - the broader point being that professions use language in ways that make it hard for outsiders to understand.

Language isn't only a way of communication, but it is the basis of many different aspects of life. Both science and math are languages of their own, and to be able to understand the style of language can help your brain to think in different ways for science and math.

The Beijing dialect is disappearing, with a decreasing number of people speaking it, said Wan Jianzhong, a scholar at Beijing Normal University and municipal CPPCC member. "With an increasing number of migrants, the city is becoming less Beijing-like. Original residents are relocated and fewer people speak the dialect and live the old lifestyle," he said. Wan believes that to bring back Beijingers' memories and sentimental attachments to their old life and culture, the dialect should be promoted. The number of migrants reached 7.04 million by 2010, 35.9 percent of the city's population, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics. "Beijingers are being non-localized by migrants. They talk to people who speak different dialects and forget to use their own," said Wan. While Putonghua should be advocated among the greater public, local dialects should not be sacrificed, he noted.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian. I just read this book, and it was extremely interesting since I read the book in conjunction with our discussions about bilingualism in class. I highly recommend this book called In Other Words.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian.

It has become a tradition for writers to completely abandon their native language and continue their writings in a new language. In this article Jhumpa Lahiri goes over the improvements to her writing brought about by this transition.

This article defines what self-talk is, how it's important and why it's important. Self-talk is "the endless stream of unspoken thoughts than run through [our] heads". If these thoughts are more positive can offer multiple health benefits, such as increased life span and increased immunity. The article also covers the four categories of self-talk (calming/relaxing, instructional, motivational, focus) , what to say to yourself (instructional self-talk or motivational self-talk), and when to say it.

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them. Researchers Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) ran 2 experiments. In the first experiment, students had to move glass marbles upward or downward into one of two cardboard boxes, with both hands simultaneously, timed by a metronome. Meanwhile, they had to recount autobiographical memories with either positive or negative emotional valence, like "Tell me about a time when you felt proud of yourself', or 'a time when you felt ashamed of yourself.' Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants' motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. The second experiment tested whether seemingly meaningless motor actions, e.g. moving marbles up or down, could influence the content of people's memories. Participants were given neutral-valence prompts, like "Tell me about something that happened during high school," so they could choose to retell something happy or sad. Their choices were determined, in part, by the direction in which they were assigned to move marbles. Moving marbles upward encouraged students to recount positive high school experiences like "winning an award," but moving them downward to recall negative experiences like "failing a test." "These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren't just in language," Casasanto says, "linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activati

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.

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.

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.

"Researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked, "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" Children were presented with a challenge: One adult matched the child's race, and one matched the child's language, but neither matched both. ... As would be expected, 9- and 10-year-old children chose the adult who matched the featured child's race. ... Five- and six-year-old English-speaking white children's responses were a bit more surprising: Most of those children chose the language match, even though this meant that the featured child would have needed to change race."

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

"Talking or texting on a phone while walking can make it difficult to stay on course and may interfere with memory recall ... Moreover, participants who were texting while walking veered off course demonstrating a 61 percent increase in lateral deviation and 13 percent increase in distance traveled."

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

"Our online survey asking Brits which Americanisms they use has had over 650 responses... It seems that "sidewalk" and "apartment" are the two commonest adoptions, while about half of you use "vacation" and "bug". There's a bit more resistance to "I'm good" over "I'm well", and to saying Z as "zee" instead of "zed". Around two-thirds stick with the British pronunciations of "process" and "progress", which seems to confirm my suspicion that those two are real assimilation watersheds."