New paraphrasing video series

Over the past year, I’ve been posting video presentations on our website, and the most popular has been the video on paraphrasing and plagiarism.

Well, I’ve updated this video, and there’s now a 3-part series on the topic, covering:

• good use of sources
• definitions of plagiarism
• types of reference and citation
• techniques for paraphrasing and summarizing

The videos are each about 15 minutes long, and you can also download the transcripts from this page.

Please let me know your feedback on the videos — what do you think about this approach to understanding paraphrasing and plagiarism? Please leave a comment below or on my blog.

Goodbye from Nigel

Next week, I’ll be leaving UNC-Chapel Hill to take up a new position as an assistant professor in the English Language Institute at the University of Delaware, starting in June. So, this is my last post to ESL on the Hill. The contents of this blog “belong” to the Writing Center, and it will continue to be run by ESL Specialists here.

I want to thank you for reading and commenting on the blog. I will be continuing to write on my own blog, Nigel Teacher, where you’ll find posts about language, language learning, and language teaching, as well as links and resources. You can also contact me through the blog, and I’ll be happy to take your grammar and vocabulary questions.

For more information about ESL services at the UNC-Chapel Hill Writing Center, please visit this website.

Goodbye from me, and good luck with your English studies!

Nigel

Word choice: sparse, scarce, rare, scant(y)

One last language post for me to end this semester, as well as my blogging on this site. We discussed the adjective in this sentence in a writing group yesterday:

Such dataset is rather scarce especially in large scale.

Part of the problem we found is that the dataset itself isn’t scarce  –  it’s the data that are scarce within the dataset. Computational scientists describe datasets as rich or poor. (Data is or data are? read on — the answer is at the end of this post!)

The choices we came up with were: scarce, sparse, scanty, and scant. They’re all close in meaning, and they have quite strong negative connotations; that is, they suggest that there isn’t enough data to do the research you want.  Scarce suggests there’s no little that a resource is hard to find or get (food or water, for example, could become scarce). Sparse is generally used for things you can count, and is quite concrete in meaning. The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus gives: “only present in small amounts or numbers and often spread over a large area” — for instance, trees are sparse if there’s only a few in a big area. Scanty is not really appropriate here — you can use it to mean insufficient (“scanty evidence”), but it more commonly means (women’s) clothing that is too revealing! The related adjective scant could work: the Collins COBUILD says one use of this word is to show “there is not as much of something as there should be” (so, it implies a judgment or evaluation).

The purpose is to …

We discussed this sentence in a writing group this week:

*The purpose of IDEA is providing …

(IDEA = Individuals with Disabilities Education Act)

The non-finite -ing form providing is incorrect here: the sentence should read:

The purpose of IDEA is to provide …

This type of sentence occurs with a linking verb such as be (also known as a copular or relational verb). The to infinitive clause (to provide) functions as the complement of the subject (the purpose of IDEA). That is, the clause after the main verb (is) “further identifies or describes the subject of the main clause” (LGSWE, p. 714-5).

This structure is most common when the subject of the sentence is:

• abstract (hope, purpose, concern, answer, function, response)
• a step in a process or argument (the first step is to, the second problem is to)
• an aim, objective, plan, goal, purpose, strategy, task, or idea
• a method or way of doing something
• a to infinitive clause itself

This pattern is fairly common in written English, although less so in spoken English. (Source: Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English)

There are situations where an ing verb is possible: the Longman grammar gives this example:

The movement’s greatest hour was fighting against an attack on the movement.

But I couldn’t find more about this. I suspect the -ing clause is less common in this position. Generally, to clauses are more abstract than ing clauses, which tend to refer to actual actions. This might help explain this pattern.

Some examples of to infinitives after linking verbs from the MICUSP corpus of student writing:

• the aim of this paper is to assess these arguments and suggest some possible common causes
• the goal now is to follow changes in the intracellular electric field
• the challenge for epidemiologist nowadays is to have an epidemic-anticipatory-capability for the appearance of new strains
• The goal of the program is to halve malarial deaths in target sub-Saharan African nations
• One way to prevent cardiovascular disease is to reduce risk factors
• if Aristotle’s purpose is to distinguish belief from phantasia …

Two deadlines this week

Please remember that today, April 15, is tax day. If you have to file a federal and/or state income tax return (and even most international students do), then make sure you get to the post office today, or file online. The April 15 deadline is for your return to be postmarked — that means the post office must stamp it today, even if the IRS (the Internal Revenue Service, the government unit that collects taxes) doesn’t get your form for another day or two.

Tomorrow (April 16) is also the deadline to return your completed 2010 U.S. Census form. If you received a form by mail, you are required to return it; otherwise, a government worker will knock on your door in May to collect the information! There’s more information about why the census is important on this official website. Census data is fascinating — on the North Carolina page, you can learn that our state’s population grew by over 1million people between 2000 and 2008. In that time, the number of fast-food restaurants increased by almost 50%, while the number of toy stores decreased. Any sociologists want to comment on that ..?

“As well as” — revisited

The use of as well as is the grammar question that won’t go away! Here’s my original blog posting explaining the usage of this phrase to join words and clauses. However, I didn’t answer a question that came up in a writing group yesterday about using as well as in a list. So, here goes …

Grammatically, the phrase is a preposition (LGSWE calls it a “complex preposition”), although the meaning blurs into a conjunction because as well as joins related ideas (The Grammar Book calls it a “prepositional logical connector” — a preposition that expresses a logical relationship between things).

In practice, this means that both “sides” of as well as must be single items or complete lists. For example:

• Correct: He plays the guitar as well as the violin.*
• Correct: We studied biology and chemistry as well as physics.
  Incorrect: We studied biology, chemistry, as well as physics.
  Explanation: biology and chemistry is a complete noun group, but biology, chemistry is incomplete
• Correct: The variables are age and sex as well as nationality and marital status.
  Incorrect: The variable are age, sex, nationality, as well as marital status.
  Explanation: as well as is not a coordinating conjunction (like and), so it can’t connect all the items in a long list like this. Both sides need their own and.

As always, please leave a comment if you have a question!

Word choice: solve or resolve?

Here’s an interesting question — what’s the difference between solve and resolve? The dictionary doesn’t tell us much — OALD gives:

• solve: to find a way of dealing with a problem or difficult situation; to find the correct answer or explanation for sth
• resolve (formal): to find an acceptable solution to a problem or difficulty [plus a couple of intransitive meanings]

However, I am sure I can hear a difference between the words, and I don’t think it’s because resolve is more formal. So, I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English for nouns that collocate with these verbs — i.e., what things do we solve or resolve. Here are the top results:

• Solve … problem mystery crime case puzzle crisis issue murder riddle conflict dilemma
• Resolve … problem issue conflict dispute difference question crisis matter situation case dilemma

From this list, I would suggest that:

• Solve carries the meaning of finding the one correct solution (the criminal, the answer to the riddle), so when it is used with words like problem, case, issue, dilemma, I am guessing it will carry over the meaning that there is one (simple?) solution.
• Resolve is used for situations that are more complex and multi-dimensional — as the dictionary indicates, it means finding a satisfactory solution (but not, perhaps the only possible solution).

Of course, solve is the more common words (about 50% more frequent in COCA than resolve), so this is likely to be most people’s first choice, but I think this distinction will hold. Please let me know if you find some good examples!

St. Patrick’s Day

 This Wednesday, March 17, is St. Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland — that’s a Catholic tradition in which certain saints (people who are recognized for dedicating their lives to their religion) are believed to protect certain countries or activities.

St. Patrick’s Day is an important day in Ireland, but it’s arguably an even bigger celebration in the U.S., especially in areas that have seen a lot of Irish immigration (Chicago and New York come to mind). Since one of Ireland’s most popular exports is its beer (especially the dark “stout” beer, Guinness), a lot of the celebrations here tend to involve drinking large amounts of it!

You might see people wearing green on Wednesday (if you live in Chicago, you might see the Chicago River dyed green!). This is because the color green is a symbol of Ireland. It’s a very green country (lots of rain …) and green is also the color of an important national symbol, the shamrock plant.

Enjoy the day, and of course, stay safe.

Clocks change on Sunday!

Daylight Savings Time begins in most of the U.S. (and definitely in North Carolina!) thia Sunday, March 14. You need to move your clocks forward one hour when you go to bed on Saturday night.

If you can’t remember which way to change your clocks, use this helpful play on words: “spring forward; fall back.”

Separatists, rebels, and other problems of word choice

It’s Spring Break, and I finally have time to catch up on answers to interesting language questions from the writing groups.

In one group, we were looking at a piece of writing about the political situation in Russia, and we discussed the differences between these words, which all refer to groups that use violence against a government: separatist, rebel, insurgent, militant. The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus adds guerrilla (pronounced like gorilla), terrorist, revolutionary and some other, less common words.

All these words have slightly different connotations depending on the public’s perception of the group (the American army in the War of Independence might be seen as revolutionaries from a U.S. perspective but separatists in Britain!).

To decide between these words, in addition to checking a dictionary, you could use a corpus search. I’m going to give examples from the TIME Corpus by Mark Davies, which searches the text of Time magazine, a well-respected U.S. news magazine. My reason is that certain labels become attached to particular situations in the media, and these become the expected way to refer to them. Here’s what I found: