#A nut graf is a “nutshell paragraph”

[sassypotatoe1]

LMAO my editor just got permission from head office to completely ban the sub-editors (proofreaders) from proofing or editing our English copy because they keep fucking up our copy. Like if you don't have an acute and strong understanding of the language you're editing for don't become a sub?? (hehe sub) Like the last straw was them changing "Amid the dissolution of the board of directors, appointment of an interim manager, and alleged wild parties leading to property damage, the Insert Name Here service center has closed indefinitely" to "with the dissolution of the board of directors, an interim manager alleged that wild parties led to property damage" and then the next paragraph, which they just fucking wrote in, which is not the job of a sub-editor, was "there were allegations of wild parties that were dangerous and disruptive" like babes, not only did you completely change the meaning of the intro, like, completely, like from "there was a new manager because the board was dissolved and there are allegations of parties" to "the new manager said so" which is completely different, the new manager said fuck-all, you also fucking added a completely redundant repetition in the nut graf like??? (hehe nut) And it's not like I didn't explain in the nut graf what these disruptions and dangers were, I laid them out in detail, the subs just felt the need to reiterate for a second time that there were wild parties.

It's also far from the first time there is A List of times they changed the meaning of our English copy completely and didn't even fix the grammar, or even made it worse. How they're still employed as subs is beyond me completely because they are decidedly horrible at it.

[allthingslinguistic]

#LingComm day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure

Previously: LingComm day 1: Goals

We started with a discussion of how things went starting out on twitter and the doge article. The single, central piece of terminology in the doge article is “selectional restriction”, and I shared a story of how someone came up to me at a linguistics conference a year after the article came out, and said that their non-linguist friend had unexpectedly known what selectional restriction was, apparently just from reading the article, so we even know it worked as a teaching tool! We compared this to the opening paragraph about selection on Wikipedia, which is considerably drier and more dense with terminology. 

Here are a few core ideas that came up:  

“Concept first; jargon second” 

This paper describes an experiment where students in different sections of the same undergrad biology class were either given the jargon or the concepts first, and the concept-first group did 1.5 times to 2.5 times better on a later test.

Terminology must be core to the explanation, not incidental to it 

Unfamiliar acronyms, IPA symbols, and technical terms all count as terminology: you get one piece of terminology per explanation, maybe two if they directly contrast. Many concepts can even be explained without any new terminology at all. Instead of acronyms, use generic nouns (”the association”, “the theory”). If you’re going to define something in passing (e.g. “semantics, the study of meaning”), you might as well just use the gloss (”meaning”) rather than impose additional cognitive load on your reader or listener. 

Examples 

Make your examples memorable, even funny if possible. Finding a joke or at least a vivid example that hinges on structural ambiguity, violation of Gricean maxims, or whatever concept you’re trying to introduce, is a more effective means of making people retain the ideas than deliberately making examples as vanilla as possible, which is what we often end up doing. 

Structure of an “explainer” piece: 

Lede

“Nut graf” (”In-a-nutshell paragraph)

Body

Kicker 

(Full post about the “explainer” structure.) 

Why am I learning this?

We also listened to two introductions of constituency tests, one from 16:06-20:45 of episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, and one from the standard classroom model as represented by 9:17-10:15 of this video), to talk about motivating the need for a concept before you introduce it, rather than jumping right into the “testable” material. 

Practice

We then played an improv game involving passing an invisible ball, which changed size and weight and eventually morphed into other objects, including a frisbee, a baby, and a shark. This game practises connection, paying attention to your audience, and structured spontaneity - the students interact with the “ball” in a spontaneous sort of way, but the progression of ball to more challenging object follows a sort of story arc. 

I then split the students into small groups where they put the explainer ideas into practice by re-framing the hour-long institute forum lecture from Thursday into a short explanation suitable for a conversation with a random non-linguist you might run into. We ended up with two different frames around the topic of entrainment or accommodation: one group talked about talking like a chameleon while another group framed it in terms of why Siri is annoying. 

Structural notes: this class exposed a weakness of the twitter-thread-as-slides idea, in that when I was preparing it I realized that there were a few things I wanted to reorder after the fact. But presenting them in the class itself went fine, and this is having the nice side effect that the students are getting practice finding things in twitter threads and hashtags. (And honestly, sometimes you end up teaching things in a different order than the best-laid slidedeck plans anyway.)

The practice part took longer than expected, so we didn’t get to the curse of knowledge, but that’ll be a good topic to start with for the next class. Assigned reading is this article by Steven Pinker but if you can’t get to the whole thing, just read the screencapped portions here and here. Homework is to make several tweets in the #lingcomm hashtag explaining a small basic linguistics concept. If you can work out how to thread them (by replying to yourself in a chain), that’s great, if not we’ll discuss threading next class. 

I also announced that office hours will be on Thursdays from 10:30-12:30 am in the Starbucks in the library.