3.4 Homework

Follow-up reading: Berg (2000)
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This is a very interesting study for those of you who are interested in Phonology. It illustrates nicely how word classes are continuous categories and how to investigate this idea empirically. It is a bit of an advanced read but worth skimming through.

3.4.1 Presentations

Beginning in week 5, we will have student contributions and also more group based work. For your contribution, you can choose from the following options:

  1. Live presentation: 2–3 people per topic
    Present a topic related to one of the weekly readings, weeks 5 to 12, in form of a short talk. The presentation should contain a primer for discussion, and an attempt at reproducing parts of the data in the reading with our current methodological knowledge. For the exact format, you can be creative.
    • You can do a screen share with a slide presentation, or
    • Send a handout and talk on camera.
    • You can even shoot a video for us to watch beforehand if you feel like.8


  1. Poster presentation: 1–2 people per topic
    Develop your own idea for a research topic and present it in the form of an academic poster. Ideally, the topic is already close to the research question of your term paper, but that’s not a must. The posters are to be submitted before the last week (13.07.) and presented during the last session in short 5-minute pitches with subsequent discussions. There is also the option of doing it asynchronously in form of a video submission. I will upload more information about how to create an academic poster when the time comes.

3.4.2 Task

  1. Pick either one of the options listed above. You can also be creative and send me your suggestion.
  2. If you would like to prepare a live presentation, please let me know via email, which two topics you are interested in. Provide a first and a second wish. If you already have a partner or group, let me know.
  3. Watch this video.

3.4.3 Tip of the day

When you write homework, essays, term papers, or even presentations, keep writing and formatting separated. Pick a pre-made document template, and stick to it. Don’t customize, don’t build from scratch. Keep your formatting at a bare minimum!

In academic writing across disciplines, all the different style guides you have to deal with might be overwhelming and confusing. But in the end, it can all be boiled down to just three key elements: text, data, and reference.9 Only the first two need to be taken care of manually during the writing process.

Text should be arranged in coherent paragraphs. Section headlines should have some specific formatting so they can be used as key for a table of contents or cross-referencing. Your type setting tool of choice (Word for most) has a way to deal with this; learn it! Anything else should be taken care of by your template.

When it comes to presenting data, here are the only three elements you should bother with manually.

  • Meta-linguistic reference: words and phrases as in-text examples in italics (see last homework)
  • Listed examples (see last homework): indented and in their own paragraph, consecutively numbered
  • Tables and figures: keep it simple here, too. They need to have title, numbering and description. Don’t bother applying unnecessary visual effects, or having the text flow nicely around them. If the table or figure doesn’t fit, it belongs in the appendix.

In a well written text, you don’t need any other visual emphasis, except maybe to highlight parts of listed examples in bold. Italics, underlined or colored text is otherwise unnecessary. There are also long quotes, book or journal titles, footnotes, and listings; however, it’s worth considering whether you actually need them. In most cases, you are better off skipping those.

Then, there are tables of content, citations and bibliographies, cross-references lists of tables/abbreviations etc.; but here is a simple rule I learned the hard way: Never create these manually—never! There are ways to deal with citations and bibliographies automatically that allow you to apply whatever style your instructor or potential publisher requires. I will return to them in a future Tiwilbemba.

In summary, keep things simple, be aware of the elements in your text, and don’t mix. Extensive formatting can be a huge time sink and should be avoided.

References

Berg, Thomas. 2000. The position of adjectives on the noun–verb continuum. English Language & Linguistics. Cambridge University Press 4(2). 269–293.

  1. Provided you send it early enough so everyone can watch it before class.↩︎

  2. This list is specific to linguistic articles but the principle applies to most pieces of text↩︎