Conclusion and References

What I initially thought would be a tedious assignment has in fact succeeded in allowing me to gather not only my knowledge, but also my own opinions about the topics we’ve covered. I have discovered new subjects, such as corpora, and found more examples of the other three subjects, which I believe will now have a direct impact on my future writing and presentations. Furthermore, I feel as though creating a blog has broadened my writing skills and also introduced me to another source of information I hadn’t investigated before, so overall it has been a beneficial assignment!

References

ASTON UNIVERSITY. (2009). ACORN Aston Corpus Network [online]. Available from: http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/index.html, [accessed 4th February 2009]

BARKER, A. (1993). Letters at work. London: The Industrial Society

LETTERWRITINGGUIDE. (2009). Sample Complaint Letter [online]. Available from: http://www.letterwritingguide.com/samplecomplaint.htm, [accessed 25th January 2009]

MEYER, C. (2002). English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

MORTON, G. (1996). Effective Business Writing. Florida: Harcourt Brace College Publishers

PHILLIPS, L. and JORGENSEN, M. (2002). Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. London: SAGE Publications

RFP TEMPLATES. (2009). Flesch Reading Ease Readability Score [online]. Available from: http://rfptemplates.technologyevaluation.com/Readability-Scores/Flesch-Reading-Ease-Readability-Score.html, [accessed 12th January 2009]

STEPHENS, C. (2000). All About Readability [online]. Available from: http://plainlanguage.com/newreadability.html, [accessed 30th October 2008]

STILLAR, G. (1998). Analyzing Everday Texts: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Perspectives. London: SAGE Publications

SWALES, J. (1990). Genre Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

THORNBURY, S. (2005). Beyond the Sentence, Introducing discourse analysis. Oxford: Macmillan Education

WOOFFITT, R. (2005). Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis. London: SAGE Publications

4. Corpus

So what is corpus? If I am perfectly honest I had no idea to start with! After a bit of googling trying to decipher the meaning I discovered that my own University has its own corpus (ACORN – Aston Corpus Network, available from: http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/) and thus shall use their definition:

“Corpus [kaw-puhs] noun; plural form: corpora [kaw-per-uh]
A corpus is a large collection of language texts, which we can analyse using software tools.”
(Aston University, 2009)

So now we know broadly what corpus is, but what is the point of it and how are we supposed to use it?

The purpose of corpus is to use a collection of texts for some type of analysis (Meyer, 2002); of course different corpora can have different purposes. The purpose of ACORN (Aston’s corpus) is to rectify the inaccuracies in language that their corpus analysis has identified, meaning there is a disparity in how we use language in comparison to how we should use language and furthermore how we learn different languages. I believe that we do not study language rules enough at school, for example how many times have you seen the wrong use of ‘they are/ their’ in published material? This is one area ACORN can help; you can search in the corpus for a word that you unsure how to use and it will give example from the texts that you can relate to. I have always had a problem with when to use ‘affect’ and ‘effect’, therefore I will search for both words in ACORN to find out which should be placed in the following sentences:

A. The potential x of a change in job must be considered.
B. The water does not x my camera.
C. Climate change has had a significant x on the weather.

Procedure:

1. Log into ACORN

2. Select language - English

3. Select Corpus – Academic texts

4. Choose word frequencies, phrase frequencies or concordance – Concordance
5. Type in ‘potential’ (to search for example A), sort results by ‘word after keyword’ and find examples of the use of ‘affect’ or ‘effect’:

Therefore example A is: “The potential effect of a change in job must be considered”

4. Type in ‘does not’ (to search for example B), sort results by ‘word before key word’ and find examples of the use of ‘affect’ or ‘effect’:

Therefore example B is: “The water does not affect my camera”

5. Type in ‘significant’ (to search for example C), sort results by ‘word before key word’ and find examples of the use of ‘affect’ or ‘effect’:

Therefore example C is: “Climate change has had a significant effect on the weather”

The examples above show just one use for ACORN (you can also search for the most commonly used words or phrases) but other corpus linguistic tools can help you check the lexical, syntactic or discourse of your text too. Although I have enjoyed learning about this topic I am still not sure I would have the time to check all my work like this, I’m afraid the corpus-like spellchecker on my computer will have to suffice for now!