What kind of style???

I’ve always had some problems with citations! Writing references to our sources is supposed to be an easy task, something that we do without thinking because we have done it many times. Actually, writing references is far from an automatic activity for the majority of students! I think the problem is that every book we read uses a different style and as a consequence we tend to be a little confused. The two websites that Sarah mentions in E-tivity 6 are clear: each of them provides the basic guidelines for citing sources and offers some useful examples. We just have to choose which style we prefer and follow it. It is necessary to make an explicit choice because the two styles are quite different from each other: we can’t use both of them at the same time. For example, there are some differences concerning references to books. According to the APA style, it is better to use initials for the author’s names and italics for the title of the book. The year of publication is written immediately after the author’s name. On the contrary, in the format elaborated by MLA, the author’s name is not abbreviated, the title is underlined and the year of publication is put at the end, after the publisher. Moreover, I noticed another difference concerning in-text citations. If we use APA style, we need to specify the year of publication when we quote or paraphrase from another work, while, in the format by MLA, the year of publication is not required and the number of page is not preceded by “p.”
I think it’s really important to choose one style and use it in every academic paper we write. If we change the style every time according to the advice of the teacher we are writing for, we risk mixing different styles and we’ll never learn to make references properly. This is my case: for my BA thesis I used the style preferred by my supervisor, which was more similar to APA style than MLA style. However, there were some differences: for example, for the in-text citations I used to put the direct quotation between inverted commas and then the author’s surname, year of publication and number of page in brackets (Author, year of publication: n.page).
All things considered, I prefer APA style because it’s more similar to the style I used in the past. Thus, I’ll follow the guidelines provided by the website, I’ll memorize them and, in this way, I hope writing references will be easier for me!

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Research Article Analysis - part 2

The research article I’m analysing consists of a well-structured text that has an hourglass shape. There is an abstract that introduces the topic and an introduction in which the author talks about the SMS technology in general and outlines the focus of the essay. The introduction is followed by the body of the essay that consists of 3 parts and provides a series of arguments based on statistics and useful examples. Finally, there is a conclusion that summarizes the main points that result from the survey. In each part of the article, the arguments are linked in a logical way by using metalinguistic signalling devices: for example in Introduction 1.2, note the use of the conjuncts “nonetheless”, “in fact” and “however”. The use of these links allows the author to achieve cohesion. Expressions like as “we suggested at the start” and the use of “this”/ “these” (e.g. “on this basis”, “in these types of messages”) are used to make reference to something that is written before in the text. In this way, the different parts of the text are connected. As a result, it is easy for the readers to follow the author’s flow of ideas. In general, the writing is clear and simple and can be understood by common readers. However, it has to be noted that a certain level of knowledge about SMS technology and linguistic features of technologically-mediated discourse is required in order to understand the references made by the author to other works and studies.

I think any kind of text, even blog posts, should follow this kind of structure because it really helps readers to understand the text in an easy way. However, it is often difficult to respect a fixed structure when we write a post because, on our blogs, we tend to be more spontaneous. Generally, I first introduce the topic of the post; second, there is the body of the post where I support my ideas and finally I always try to conclude establishing a contact with my readers, for example asking them for their personal opinions.
We can avoid using a specific structure on condition that we organize our ideas in a clear way, for example using conjuncts and coordinators, because the reader should always find it easy to follow the flow of our ideas!

I don't want to be a "plagiarist"!!!

When we talk about “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPR) we usually refer to those laws that were developed to respect the rights of the inventors of new tools and machines or of the artists. What about ideas and words used to express ideas and opinions? Even words and ideas have their original source and it’s really important to respect it! If we don’t attribute words and ideas to their original source we become guilty of plagiarism. For this reason we must pay attention to the words we use every time we write something that is not a shopping list! This means we must avoid plagiarism not only in our academic papers but also in our blog posts. Sometimes we find something really interesting in other people’s blogs that is very difficult not to copy and paste, especially when we realize other people express what we think in a better way. In an article published by The Boston Globe I read that blog plagiarism has become a very widespread phenomenon: every day, people read and steal other people’s blog entries, no matter how personal or famous a blog is. We should avoid doing so. I think a blog is something that we create to have the possibility to say what we think using our own words: copying someone else’s words doesn’t make sense! We can refer to other people’s opinions and ideas without using their words, for example paraphrasing or summarizing them. We can also use quotations and make explicit reference to the original source. Moreover, we should tell the reader where the photos or images we use on the blog come from, writing links to the source. In short, in our blog posts we should follow the same rules we usually respect when we write an academic essay. To have a general idea about the good way to write in our own words, have a look at this website “ABC of quotations and your own words and references versus plagiarism”. In this way, we obtain something that is personal and reflects our way of thinking and express our opinions.
Then we should protect our blog from other people’s plagiarism! As far as this problem is concerned, “Plagiarism Today”, a blog dedicated to the issue of plagiarism online, says that plagiarism can be reduced in many ways, for example by putting a copyright notice on the blog. We really need to protect our English blogs: we are working hard on them, nobody can copy them without making reference! Do you agree with me?

Ilaria.

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Was that research article reliable???

On the internet, it’s really difficult to find exactly what you are interested in, especially if you don’t know how to do your search. When I was preparing my Tesi Triennale on SMS language, I didn’t know all the tools that are available on the Internet (I’m discovering them now!) and so I really wasted a lot of time in surfing the Net. But I think I was lucky because I found a very effective article that is still published on TXT2NITE.COM, in the sms forum of the website. This essay, “Generation Txt? The sociolinguistics of young people's text-messages”, is written by Dr Crispin Thurlow and it is an analysis of text messages sent by teenagers. The research article starts with an abstract that explains the aim of the research: the essay aims to examine the linguistic forms and communicative functions in a corpus of 544 participants' actual text-messages. It’s a quantitative study based on a quite large corpus of text messages. The data arising from the analysis of this corpus are interpreted taking into consideration many aspects, which can concern for example the socio-linguistic context, the technological characteristics, and the linguistic features. At the end of the article there is a conclusion that summarizes the significant observations emerged from the research.

I think this research article can be considered an authoritative source of information. First of all, we know the name of the author and we can easily found further information about him, about his status and his publications. Secondly, there are many references to other authors, books and surveys. In this version of the essay, we can also find a detailed bibliography. Then, the whole essay is protected by copyright.
If you are interested in this topic, you can certainly use this research article as a reliable source in your academic papers. This kind of articles can be very useful, especially in this case: there aren’t many academic works (I mean “traditional books”) dealing with SMS language, so the sources found on the Internet become really precious!

Ilaria.

What kind of information do we find on the Internet?

How do we evaluate reliability and authority of information we find on the Internet? This is a good question!

It’s important to think about it; we really need to have some criteria to follow in order to filter information on the Internet. The list we elaborated on Wednesday can be really useful to our research. Taking into consideration that list, I tried to evaluate the sources of information about "personal learning environment" that I found using Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Scholar.
I noticed that some blogs can be considered valuable sources of information: they show more “serious” graphics and layout than those showed by other personal blogs, they offer information about the author (even biographies), and they’re protected by copyright. I think blogs can be seen as the starting point of our research because reading blogs we can find the name of other authors, websites, books… It’s an easy way to know what other people think about a specific topic.
Then I used Google Books. The information I found is certainly reliable. Indeed, using this tool you find books and books satisfy almost all the criteria of our list!
For me, the most useful tool is Google Scholar. On Google Books we can find only parts of books, while on Google Scholar we find complete essays, journal articles, PDF documents … Moreover, it’s easier to choose what interests us because these kind of documents usually have an abstract: we just need to read it to understand if the document is what we’re looking for.
Taking into consideration the above observations, I decided that, from today onwards, my research on the internet will consist of 4 steps! I’ll use:
1. Google (especially Wikipedia) and Google Blogs to have a general idea and see what other people can tell me about the topic of my research
2. del.icio.us to find detailed information about authors, websites, books…
3. Google Books to see if a specific book is published online and to read bibliographies that allow me to find out other books, authors…
4. Google Scholar to see if I can find some complete documents published online.

I hope this method will work!!! :-)

Ilaria.

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