“I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don’t think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don’t intend to choose […]
Continue reading →Via this post on Splitsider, I read this interesting account of the State’s doomed move to network television. Written by David Lipsky, it’s a well-researched piece of immersive journalism, one made rather poignant with the benefit of 16 years of distance. (The State and its members have had a ton of success, and yet there’s always […]
Continue reading →Very sorry this blog has been so quiet. I am deep in a very busy, very fulfilling semester. I promise to post several times in the next week. Some topics I’m working on: A review of Matt Yglesias’s The Rent Is Too Damn High! ebooklet– or should that be in quotations, and not italics?– and […]
Continue reading →In the New York Times: Gail: You may be right that the big issue for America now is class, not race or gender. But in this presidential campaign, gender rules. Really, sex rules. Who’d have thought? David: Class is gender. Specifically men. [emphasis mine] The wage stagnation and inequality stories are largely stories about how badly […]
Continue reading →This awesome Language Log post, which includes some audio examples and waveform data, reminds me of how I often used to get confused about the phonetics-phonology distinction. These are both among the major branches of linguistics, along with syntax, semantics, morphology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. (Fun activity: get a bunch of linguists together and ask […]
Continue reading →In recent decades, advances in eye tracking technology have made eye movement studies practical, non-invasive, and precise. Computers outfitted with sophisticated eye tracking equipment can record and analyze the movement of a subject’s eyes with great precision, giving us a tremendous amount of data about eye movement and vision. The traditional qualifier is that, while […]
Continue reading →“A normal educated adult speaker of English has an active vocabulary– i.e., words that he actually uses in everyday speech– of about 30,000 words. A speaker makes the the right choice from among those 30,000 or so alternatives not just once but, in fluent speech, continuously two to five times per second– a rate that […]
Continue reading →This is the sort of thing that I should learn to just keep to myself, but here goes. The just-released issue of Research in the Teaching of English (46.3) has a study I really admire, “Placement of Students into First-Year Writing Courses.” (In the unfortunate custom of academic articles, the PDF is gated, though an abstract is available here.) […]
Continue reading →Which isn’t, I’ll hasten to say, a big problem. Last week, I was invited to a bull session about a new, tablet-based ebook version of a writing textbook. The publisher had asked the authors to get creative with brainstorming; they feel, as do the authors, that e-textbooks have not really begun to explore the possibilities […]
Continue reading →Astra Taylor has written a response to the piece by Dana Goldstein that I referenced in my last post; Conor Friedersdorf has responded to both Goldstein’s piece and mine. Both essays are worth your time and interest. Update: Goldstein follows up.
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