8.3 Homework

We have looked at frequency patterns of irregular past tense forms. Construct an argument on whether the same pattern can be observed for plural forms of nouns. Support your argument with data. Use the tools at your disposal, including demonstrations in this section and the cheat sheet in the Links section.

Bonus task: visualize the data. As soon as you have some numbers in a spreadsheet, it isn’t too hard to figure out how to create some nice bar charts.

8.3.1 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 (that doesnt meen format badly)!

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
  • Listed examples: 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. Most of those conventions you can see in action on this blog.

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.

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