All your base ...

Today I decided to give my students some help in identifying formal vs. informal language (an area all people learning foreign languages have problems with). I gave them a list of sentences which they had to identify as formal, informal, neutral (i.e. the kind of thing you could use in almost any context) and mixed. In student writing, the last type is the one that jars most. Mixing formal and informal language is like mixing formal and informal clothes: a few people can get away with wearing a tuxedo over ripped jeans, but most of the time it makes you look laughable. (Turks, by the way, are particularly bad at this - I've been at weddings when I wanted to scream at people "YOU ARE NOT CARSON KRESSLEY!")

Naturally, since this was a course about games, I couldn't resist including "All your base are belong to us!" Students on this course have particular problems in identifying linguistic register, since they're constantly skipping from texts by the likes of Wittgenstein to posts on game forums. It's not surprising that they get their styles confused. And of course if they base their academic writing style on what they read in my LJ, they'll be totally pwned ;-)