As a scientist, you are expected to share your research work with others in various forms. Probably the most demanding of these forms is the paper published in a scientific journal. Such papers have high standards of quality, and they are formally disseminated and archived. Therefore, they constitute valuable, lasting references for other scientists and for you, too.

Essays on Lifeboat Ethics

In fact, the number of papers you publish and their importance as suggested by their impact factor are often viewed as a reflection of your scientific achievements. As you may have noticed, however, many scientific papers fail to usefully communicate research work to their audience. They focus on the authors instead of on the readers by failing to clarify the motivation for the work or by including unnecessary details. As a result, they are interesting to or understandable by only a small set of highly specialized readers. Effective scientific papers, in contrast, are interesting and useful to many readers, including newcomers to the field.

In particular, it will help you select and organize your content, draft your paper, and revise your writing so that your final paper is useful to a broad audience not just a few specialists. Define a research question select and arrange a limited material conduct a theoretical discussion and analyse linguistic problems in english use secondary sources in a critical way if you choose your topic wisely, you may also make a contribution to english linguistics. Your teacher will suggest possible topics that relate to the course you are taking. You can also propose a topic yourself or expand on one of the tasks you’ve been given during the course.

Counter Argument Essay

Another possibility is to carry out a study similar to one that you have read about in the course syllabus. It is important to be realistic and limit the topic, so that you can finish your paper within a reasonable period of time. Primary material is the actual linguistic data you write about, such as written texts, transcriptions of spoken material, tape recordings, or elicited responses from native speakers. For the corpus linguistics course, you will be expected to get your primary material from a corpus. This will show you what has been done before which means that you do not have to do it and will probably give you ideas on how you should or should not deal with your primary material, on problems that you had not thought of, etc.

Literary Analysis Essay Night Elie Wiesel

In connection with a term paper there is of course a limit to the amount of secondary sources you can be expected to go through. In going through the secondary material, you should make notes and collect excerpts as you go along. It is important to organize your notes in such a way that you can survey and rearrange them while you are working on your paper.

If you are writing in a computer document, make sure you organize your paragraphs with headlines or keywords that will help you see immediately what the paragraph is about. If you write on paper, write on one side of the paper or on index cards , to make it possible to reorder the notes or add to them. Make sure that you copy your excerpts correctly and write the name of the source and the page number immediately.

Though it is important to study the secondary material carefully, your main task is to collect and analyse some primary material. You may draw your primary material from corpora such as the lob corpus, the british national corpus bnc , the corpus of contemporary american english coca , the english norwegian parallel corpus enpc , the oslo multilingual corpus omc , the international corpus of english ice , or the international corpus of learner english icle, including the norwegian subcorpus nicle. If you are interested in grammar, the million word lob corpus or the ice gb will often be sufficient. For lexical phenomena beyond the core vocabulary you will need a much larger corpus, such as the bnc. If you want to study translation or compare languages, you will find a good source in the enpc or the oslo multilingual corpus omc. Aspects of learner english can be studied on the basis of the international corpus of learner english icle. Many corpora can be searched by means of wordsmith tools see scott 2001 , but for example, the bnc, ice gb the british part of ice , and the enpc have their own search engines.

This will show you if your material is giving you enough data, and the right kind of data, or whether you may have to use different kinds of material. Normally a card index should be quite sufficient for the limited amount of material that can reasonably be dealt with in a term paper. You can use it for storing, surveying, analysing and retrieving your material efficiently. Whichever system you use, make sure to copy each example correctly, to copy enough context, and to note the source correctly at once, to save time and trouble later on. This is because you may want to look up the example in the corpus again for example, if you need to look at the wider context and because you should specify the source when you give quotations from your material. We can broadly distinguish between the following stages: data collection classification analysis suppose you are interested in studying the position of the direct object with phrasal verbs i.e.

The secondary sources will tell you that a pronoun as direct object is placed between the verb and the particle e.g. she switched it on , while a noun or noun headed phrase may appear either before or after the particle. The working title of your term paper could be what factors determine the placement of nouns and noun phrases as direct objects of phrasal verbs? . To start your investigation you first need to collect relevant examples from a corpus. The examples may be extracted in the form of concordance lines, sentences, or other units, depending on your research question. Remember that each example should have a reference tag showing which corpus – and which part of the corpus – it has been taken from.

And what about examples like these from the lob corpus: dr horn swayed two or three inches back. The first example looks superficially like a construction with a direct object, but should no doubt be analysed as containing an adverbial. In the last example up clearly goes with the following prepositional phrase rather than with own. Do we recognize have off as a phrasal verb? collecting the primary material is not easy.

It is necessary to be alert, so as not to miss out relevant examples or include irrelevant ones. If you have studied the secondary material carefully, you will have a good idea about what to look for and how to distinguish relevant from irrelevant examples. As you go on you may discover that it is necessary to limit the material a great deal. For example, in a study of phrasal verbs, it may be necessary to limit the search to certain verbs with different particles, or to certain particles with different verbs. In a study of phrasal verbs 1986 stig johansson decided to focus on all examples in the lob corpus of six lexical verbs co occurring with a noun or noun headed phrase as direct object and ten particles see table 1. To find these, it was necessary to search for all forms of the relevant verbs followed within a certain span by one of the ten particles.

How to Write a Short Essay for An Exam

After irrelevant instances had been discarded, the material was as presented in table 1. The table gives some useful information it shows that there is one clearly dominant order v part o. 4.3 classification of the material the next logical step in the investigation process is the classification of the material. It is natural to start thinking about the classification while the material is being collected. To take our example with the order of direct objects with phrasal verbs, we classify each example according to the parameters which we suspect may affect the word order based on the secondary reading or our own preliminary hypotheses.