Editing Repetitive Words
Prior Knowledge
Before beginning this activity, students should discuss the use of over used words and editing to eliminate words that are over used while maintaining the meaning of the sentence and paragraph. With experience in editing for word use from the preactivity, students should be able to use newly learned skills and corpus tools to locate key words and make edit the paper for over used words.
Reading
Kennedy C., & Tiziana M. (2010). Corpus-assisted Creative Writing: Introducing Intermediate Italian Learners to a Corpus as a Reference Resource. Language Learning and Technology, 14(1), 20-44.
TLWBT
Materials
Activity Development
This will engage students in “pattern hunting” which is “ intended to “[encourage] novice writers to experiment with grammatical and lexical patterns that they might otherwise be unaware of, or misuse, or avoid”. looking for” (Kennedy, 7) by locating the words or patterns that they are over using and then having them think critically to try and avoid the use of these words.
By walking students through the search for their key words and then guiding them through the process of completing their first search with AntConc the process of generating the list of sentences and paragraphs will be easier to generate for the rest of the words on their word list as they only have to repeat the search for the words in the list in the program. By completing the activity the students will take a top down approach (Flowerdew) by generating the claim that the words in the word list are overused in their paper and then through the process of editing will determine if these assumptions are correct. Through this process students will work with individual paragraphs and sentences and practice the editing technique learned in the preactivity to deconstruct the sentences and paragraphs while maintaining the same meaning.
Upon completion of the activity students will have a the comparison of the original text to the new text and then will be able to use what they have worked on in the activity and be able to apply what they have worked on to their final paper. Because this is an editing practice, students will find that they cannot remove the use of all of the words that are repeated or overused and will be able to better understand the idea of making local edits that will contribute to the paper as a whole. The use of the corpus tools is to bring focus away from the text as a whole and focus on micro things to promote clarity by eliminating the use of repeated words.
Reflective Notes:
This activity could take up a lot of time since it uses multiple tools. Going back and forth between LexTutor and AntConc was a personal choice since LexTutor already had a corpus built into it. If one were to have access to a corpus that could be loaded into AntConc then this activity could be solely carried out using AntConc. However, the added benefit by having this activity use multiple tools will only aid future activities, as students will gain exposure to two tools in this activity. So the increased time that it may take to go through this activity may have its added benefits in the long run as someone were to go through using all of these activities as editing tools.
Eliminating repetitive words makes a paper sound and flow a lot better and this is why I chose to start with this activity. This is something that can be spotted simply by reading a paper and the reader will notice what those words are, however using the corpus tools in this activity also gives feedback. By using LexTutor and finding keywords, this activity will give support for why a word may be repeated, if its a keyword, and then will allow students to find those registers to edit.
This activity takes the editing practice from a global perspective and localizes it, in that students are just looking for one specific thing. Typically the editing process takes a global approach and students just look for syntax, and things that pop out as they read. The goal of this activity was to look at the editing process from a localized perspective, in this case just looking for repeated words and trying to find ways to eliminate those words as they appear repeated or overused.
Before beginning this activity, students should discuss the use of over used words and editing to eliminate words that are over used while maintaining the meaning of the sentence and paragraph. With experience in editing for word use from the preactivity, students should be able to use newly learned skills and corpus tools to locate key words and make edit the paper for over used words.
Reading
Kennedy C., & Tiziana M. (2010). Corpus-assisted Creative Writing: Introducing Intermediate Italian Learners to a Corpus as a Reference Resource. Language Learning and Technology, 14(1), 20-44.
TLWBT
- Take prior knowledge to editing for word use and apply it to editing a personal essay
- Edit paper to convey the same meaning while eliminating the use of words that appear to be over used.
- Be able to look at paragraphs and the text as a whole to identify words that are overused.
- Deconstruct a sentence and paragraph to eliminate words that are used more than once, by removing unnecessary verb and noun phrase sand replace or add the proper nouns and adjectives to create clarity while conveying the same meaning.
- Have fun.
Materials
- Electronic copy of paper
- Use of individual computers
- Access to Lex Tutor (http://www.lextutor.ca/)
- AntConc v3.2
Activity Development
This will engage students in “pattern hunting” which is “ intended to “[encourage] novice writers to experiment with grammatical and lexical patterns that they might otherwise be unaware of, or misuse, or avoid”. looking for” (Kennedy, 7) by locating the words or patterns that they are over using and then having them think critically to try and avoid the use of these words.
By walking students through the search for their key words and then guiding them through the process of completing their first search with AntConc the process of generating the list of sentences and paragraphs will be easier to generate for the rest of the words on their word list as they only have to repeat the search for the words in the list in the program. By completing the activity the students will take a top down approach (Flowerdew) by generating the claim that the words in the word list are overused in their paper and then through the process of editing will determine if these assumptions are correct. Through this process students will work with individual paragraphs and sentences and practice the editing technique learned in the preactivity to deconstruct the sentences and paragraphs while maintaining the same meaning.
Upon completion of the activity students will have a the comparison of the original text to the new text and then will be able to use what they have worked on in the activity and be able to apply what they have worked on to their final paper. Because this is an editing practice, students will find that they cannot remove the use of all of the words that are repeated or overused and will be able to better understand the idea of making local edits that will contribute to the paper as a whole. The use of the corpus tools is to bring focus away from the text as a whole and focus on micro things to promote clarity by eliminating the use of repeated words.
Reflective Notes:
This activity could take up a lot of time since it uses multiple tools. Going back and forth between LexTutor and AntConc was a personal choice since LexTutor already had a corpus built into it. If one were to have access to a corpus that could be loaded into AntConc then this activity could be solely carried out using AntConc. However, the added benefit by having this activity use multiple tools will only aid future activities, as students will gain exposure to two tools in this activity. So the increased time that it may take to go through this activity may have its added benefits in the long run as someone were to go through using all of these activities as editing tools.
Eliminating repetitive words makes a paper sound and flow a lot better and this is why I chose to start with this activity. This is something that can be spotted simply by reading a paper and the reader will notice what those words are, however using the corpus tools in this activity also gives feedback. By using LexTutor and finding keywords, this activity will give support for why a word may be repeated, if its a keyword, and then will allow students to find those registers to edit.
This activity takes the editing practice from a global perspective and localizes it, in that students are just looking for one specific thing. Typically the editing process takes a global approach and students just look for syntax, and things that pop out as they read. The goal of this activity was to look at the editing process from a localized perspective, in this case just looking for repeated words and trying to find ways to eliminate those words as they appear repeated or overused.