Typos

I only noticed in the exam today that in the text I had given to students to comment on, "an already" had come out as "anal ready". Fortunately neither the students nor the exam committee picked up on this!

This follows on from a quiz in which I used an example sentence about Buffy, Kendra and Faith - except that I had written "Fatih". Since this is a common Turkish name (it means "conqueror"), my students were most amused by the idea of "Fatih the vampire slayer."

Paragraphs

Hi guys its me again. Betchall missed me huh?

Now Im in college Ive made a resolution that Im gonna write in proper sentneces. No more aolspeak 4 me!! Were doing this course called english and compositoin which they say is really useful for like, getting jobs and says how you shud write with proper style and you shouldnt write things like runon sentences and stuff. But that's not all! Today the prof (who is a todal beotch) was going on about paragraph cohesion and topic sentences.

Like huh? i thought you just carried on writing until you got bored or needed to go 4 a pee then you started a new paragrahp. i axed uncle solri and he said "Yes my dear that is exactly what i do'. And like hes PUBLISHED stuff!!11 So i ask him about topic snetences and cuz hes a prof he gives me this exercise! Like, if id wanted an exercise i cud go to the gym heheheh ;-)

Anyway he says "read these 2 paragarphs and find the topic sentences. Here they are ....

The realisation that not all features are created equal gave rise to the “weighted feature-bundle” approach (Coleman & Kay, 1981). A simple feature bundle fails to describe the internal structure of a category, nor does it give an accurate picture of its relationship with other categories (Langacker, 1987:19-20). Therefore an alternative is to rank features from most to least essential. However, while the idea of assigning different weightings to features is useful, it is still necessary to draw a distinction between types of feature in terms of those that define a category and those that establish centrality within that category. For this reason Lehrer (1974) proposed a distinction between ‘obligatory’ and ‘optional’ features, and similar approaches have been adopted by Lipka (1986), and Wierzbicka (1985). What these approaches have in common is an attempt to reconcile feature- and prototype-based categorisations.

From a different perspective, Jackendoff (1983) and Pustejovsky (1995) have also addressed this problem. Jackendoff in particular suggests that the combination of an atomistic feature-based system with preference rules can explain “categories with fuzzy boundaries and family resemblance properties á la Wittgenstein and Roth” (1992:206). In any case, it is obvious that mere resemblance to a prototype is in itself insufficient as a basis for categorisation. As Wierzbicka (1990:350) points out, resemblance does not explain why “an ostrich is a bird but a bat is not”, as the latter is in many ways closer to our celebrated prototypical robin than the former. Furthermore, Cruse (1990:388) argues, “It is not easy to see how the boundaries of a category can be derived from its prototypes.”

like DOH! i cant even understand them let alone find a topic!! When i sed that he just went "heh heh there isnt a topic sentence". Sometimes i reeeeally HATE him. so of course i axed how come theres no topic snetences and he sez 'well it got thru peer review so why shud i care"? i cant BELIEVE this guy teaches english!!!111