APA

APA (The American Psychological Association) is one of the most common referencing systems used, including at EMU. It's therefore important to learn about it. There's a short introduction in Wikipedia that tells you basically what it is and how it came about.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Make sure you reference all your sources at all times. Direct quotations with reference are often used for this purpose. So are paraphrases. Paraphrasing means rewriting the author's original words into your own words. But remember! When paraphrasing, you still have to provide the reference and source!

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is one of the most serious academic offences. It is using other people's work or ideas without crediting their work by referencing it. These days it's also rather easy to detect through plagiarism detecting software, and even through search engines. A reader familiar with subject content will also spot plagiarism relatively easily, and so will a reader familiar with the style and level of the writer's English.

Daily Postgraduate English Newspaper

With the wonders of modern technology, we can now proudly announce that we have a Postgraduate English Daily Newspaper, updated every twenty-four hours. Take a look at the first edition and add the site to your bookmarks. A link to the newspaper is also provided in the EMU links section of this Blog.

However, to access the newspaper, you will need to open a free twitter account if you do not already have one. (Make sure you become a follower of EMUPLD at the same time!)

Concordancer

Our final post on Lextutor is about Concordancer. With the concordancer, you enter words to find out how they are used in the corpuses the site makes use of.

Let's say, I want to know how to use the word 'research'; I enter the word into the keyword box, and select the corpus I want to use (it's a drop down box) and submit. You get something like the following back, and studying it you start to see how 'research' is used and the types of words that are commonly used with 'research'.

Frequency Counter

The LexTutor Frequency Counter works in a similar way. You paste text or upload a file and the programme gives you the frequency of words in a text.

How might this be useful? Well, say, you were about to read an article, and you wanted to find the most important words in the article that you might need to know before reading it. Put the article in the frequency counter, and you'll find out.

You can also obviously learn something about the frequency with which you use certain words in your own writing.

International Night

Just a reminder that this Thursday evening at 8.00 is International Night, with a range of activities, performances and cuisines from many different countries. Hope to see as many of you there as possible.

Advice (based on last year): Come hungry!

Vocabulary Profiler in Action

If you put a text into the profiler, you'll see something like this (click to enlarge): Blue words are the most frequent 1000 words in English, green words are from the 1001-2000 range (GSL2) and yellow words are from the Academic Word List. The red words are the 'others'; very often these might be technical words from your own field.

A nice feature of the profiler is that you can edit your text in another window, changing words to make your vocabulary more varied and sophisticated.

Vocabulary Profiler

LexTutor also has a Vocabulary Profiler. You can enter any text into the vocabulary profiler and it will tell you, for example, which words in the text are from General Service Lists 1 and 2, and which are from the Academic Word List and give you percentages.

Some people say that very good academic writing makes use of more lower frequency words. You can get an idea of your profile by entering a text into the profiler, and comparing your writing, say, with an article from your field.

List-Learn

Lextutor provides more than tests; it also provides lists to learn from. On its list-learn pages, you will find help with revising or learning the:

GSL (General Service Lists) 1000 and 1001-2000 lists. These are the most frequent 2000 words in English.

UWL (University Word List) and AWL (Academic Word List). These lists provide lists of additional words that their designers identified as being particularly useful in academic work.

Lextutor

Lextutor is a Canadian vocabulary site for researchers, instructors and students. Amongst many other useful tools, you can test your vocabulary knowledge of the most frequent words in English to the level of 14,000.

In the tests, you'll see references to K1 and K2. K1 refers to the most frequent 1000 words in English; K2 to the next most frequent 1000 words, and so on. What's the significance of this then? Take a look at the figures below. Basically, the first 1000 words in English are so common that they make up an average of 79.7% of any text you read. After that word families get less frequent and as a result harder to learn. But note that the 6000 mark has still not hit 90% - some way from the magic 95% number. Here's the link to the tests.


86,741   100 %
43,831  99.0
 6,000  89.9

 5,000  88.6

 4,000  86.7 
 3,000  84
 2,000  79.7
 1,000  72.0
 10  23.7

Test your vocabulary knowledge

You can test out your vocabulary range and knowledge by taking this test. To reach the magic 95% figure for full comprehension by the way, you probably need a vocabulary of at least 6000-8000 words.

How good is your vocabulary?

It has been suggested that to have a fairly complete understanding of a text that you should know approximately 95% of the words in front of you. With this knowledge, you can probably work out the meanings of unknown words from context. This means knowing 19 out of every 20 words in front of you. Try it out with a few pages of academic text, and see how close you are to the magic 95% figure and how much further you need to go.

Academic Phrase Bank

There's a useful bank of words and phrases you can use in academic writing at the Manchester University Phrasebank. 

Postgraduate English Workshops and Seminars

Soon, we hope to be starting off a series of postgraduate English language seminars and workshops. Before we do so, we'd like to hear from you about the kinds of workshops you'd most benefit from. There's a poll now on this site that will only take a few seconds to complete, and if you'd like to make any additional suggestions, just hit the 'comment' button and fire away.

ISI Web of Knowledge

ISI Web of Knowledge is an academic citation indexing and search service, which is combined with web linking and provided by Thomson Reuters. Web of Knowledge coverage encompasses the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. It provides bibliographic content and the tools to access, analyze, and manage research information. A notable attribute is that multiple databases can be searched simultaneously.

Find out more about the importance of citation in academic work by browsing the rest of this Wikipedia article.

Then learn more about citation indexes at Thomson Reuters.

Indian Film Festival

The Indian Student Society is holding a film festival from the 19th-21st October (Click on image for more information. Each of these classic films will have English subtitles, so as well as being an introduction to an extraordinnarily rich culture, there's an opportunity to see how watching films and using subtitles might contribute to English language learning and development.

Plagiarism Checking

Many institutions now have advanced plagiarism software and run a standard check on work submitted, particularly at higher levels, e.g. for theses. There are some free plagiarism software programmes available also. One of these is called Plagiarism Checker. If you're worried about something you're working on, you can paste your text into the programme, and it will scan the internet for similarities.

Out of interest, I pasted one of my published articles into the site in the original Word format. Sure enough, it found me out ! At the same time, because it conducts the search on the basis of relatively short phrases, it directed me to some sites and research I wasn't aware of, which was a useful bonus.

Of course, even GOOGLE can perform the same function, so it's sometimes worth self-checking work through such sites.

Back up your work

It's obvious isn't it? Your computer crashes, your flash drive ends up in the washing machine, you drop your portable hard disk... But it still happens and all your hard work disappears into cyberspace. So, do regularly back up important work by:


 i) keeping copies of your work on portable media.
ii) e-mailing work to yourself (free services like dropsend are available that will send large files by email).
iii) saving work on the Internet, e.g on GOOGLE docs or other similar web-based services that will store your work for you, and enable you to access it at anytime and any place.

These days, losing data and work will not be accepted as a good excuse or an unfortunate accident, but just viewed as carelessness.

Translation Tools

Translation tools are more and more widely used these days. Both GOOGLE and Microsoft have translation services. You can access the latter directly from Word 2007. But: Beware of using them for anything much more than getting a quick general understanding of a document:

Take a look at this. It's part of the original English of our first newsletter.

http://twitter.com/emupld

So, we’d suggest you create a Twitter account, and become a follower of the EMUPLD twitter, so that you receive regular updates and learning advice throughout the year.

You’ll also receive news through the website and twitter of extra seminars and workshops and other events to help you with your language learning.

All of you are also invited to keep up with research at EMU, by creating an account at the EMU research newsletter website at: http://researchnewsletter.emu.edu.tr/

When your own research is advanced, you can even consider publishing some of your work in the newsletter.

I then used a well-known translation service to translate this to Arabic. And then the same service again to independently translate the Arabic version into English. Here's what came back:

http://twitter.com/emupld

Therefore, we would like to suggest a Twitter account and become an affiliate of Twitter Amobld, since you receive regular updates and learning advice throughout the year.

You will also receive news via a website and Twitter additional seminars, workshops and other events help you in your language.

You all are invited also to keep up with research in economic and Monetary Union, by creating an account at site newsletter research in economic and Monetary Union http://researchnewsletter.emu.edu.tr/:

When your search, you can consider to publish some of your work in the newsletter.

This alone should suggest that using translation tools as any kind of basis for academic writing is definitely not a smart idea. 

Spellchecking and more with Google

A quick spellcheck can also be conducted by sticking a word in the GOOGLE search engine. The results will also show the word is used in sentences and phrases.
If you want to check phrases, use the Advanced Search option (just to the right of the normal GOOGLE search window).
GOOGLE has many other specialised search options. Included as a link on this page is the GOOGLE Scholar Search, which narrows a search to academic material.
For example, if you are studying tourism, a general search may well provide hits of no relevance (e.g. travel agencies, airlines etc.); A GOOGLE Scholar search excludes this material.

Pasting from Word into the Internet

Before putting text into a web-based environment - e.g. a MOODLE discussion, it's really useful to draft your work in MS Word, saving a copy, and using the MS Word spellcheck and grammar check tools.

However, according to the programmes you are using, you may sometimes see some funny results from your pasting with odd bits of computer code appearing. These come from the Word source.

To avoid this:

1) Some Internet sites have a special 'clean Word' copy icon to use to paste. Check toolbars for this.
2) Other Internet sites will ask you whether you want to keep or remove 'formatting'; Remove it.

This works the other way round as well, i.e. when copy-pasting from the Internet to Word. When doing this:
1) Instead of using paste, use paste special (go to 'edit' on your toolbar); and select paste as unformatted text.

This gets rid of images, codes and all other unnecessary material and makes the pasting a lot quicker as well.

EMU Research Newsletter

Did you know that EMU has its own Research Newsletter and Research Newsletter website, which is published four times a year? The Research Newsletter lists all the publications by the EMU community, conferences attended and more. Furthermore, the newsletter includes short research articles by staff and students; so if you are looking to start publishing some of your research, the newsletter is a good place to start.

So, why not take a look at the Research Newsletter Website to find out more.

Grammar Check in Office

The University of Wisconcin have a short tutorial on how to use the grammar check in Word. It is worth using the grammar check, but as the Wisconcin site points out, you do have to use some judgement;

The grammar check is not always right!

Check out their advice here.

Paper Rater

Paper Rater is another site you might try out. You paste your text into a window and ask for a report, which examines your writing according to six categories, as shown below (click image to enlarge):

Spellcheck Plus

If you google around for spellcheck programmes, you'll find other alternatives, many of them free and others offering 'extras'. Here, for example, is a screenshot from SpellcheckPlus

You'll see that spellcheck plus is identifying phrases for you to check. By putting our mouse over the highlighted section - in this case 'the military service', we can get an explanation - see top right - of the problem. Quite clever! (Click on the image to see this in full size).

Careful with spellcheck!

Spellcheck is built on a dictionary and is trained to recognise existing words. If you choose the wrong word, or if in your 'wrong' spelling you accidentally spell another word correctly, spellcheck won't spot the problem. Here's an example:

Were are the students? I want to no if these are there books?

3 'spelling' mistakes but spellcheck won't notice any of them, because they are all real words.

Always use spellcheck!
Always check spelling again yourself!

Gettting your spacing right!

Important: Do make sure when using Word that you space words properly.

Wrong Use:  I have a big house,which is painted red.The neighbours hate it.

There are no spaces after the commas and full stops; The computer will count the part in red as one word, and indicate a spelling mistake.

Right Use: I have a big house, which is painted red. The neighbours hate it.

Readability statistics in Word

When word has finished a spelling and grammar check and if you have checked the Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid options in word, you should see something like the image on the left. This gives an idea of the level you are writing at. The Flesch-Kincaid level approximates to the American High School system. Here the grade level is 12.0 - meaning 12th grade, age around 17-18 would be the lowest level at which to use this piece of writing.
Now take a look at this explanation of the Reading Ease formula. As you'll see 17.7 means you need to be a college graduate to deal with the text. There is also a suggestion that the text may be confusing to some readers. Perhaps worth having another look, particularly to check on sentence length and punctuation?

Use spellcheck and grammar check in MS Office

Whichever version of Office you use, and wherever you are working, make sure that the language of the computer is switched to English.

Go to Tools and then Options, and check mark the options you want to make use of.

DO check the options for the Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid reading ease scales.

Then check out this Wikipedia Entry to find out what they are.

New language discovered

Here's an extraordinary story. We all know that many rare languages around the world are dying - but it's certainly not often that a new language is discovered. But that's what's happened here. Check out this fascinating story from today's BBC