UQx
Improving writing through corpora: Data-driven learning?
About This Course
Welcome to UQ SLATx 'Improving writing through corpora'!
This 8 hour course aims to provide you with the tools, knowledge and skills to become a 'language detective', using special software to improve your academic writing. As a novice writer for your discipline, you may make mistakes with your writing that you don't know how to solve. If you are a second-language user of English, this can be even more difficult. But what if there was a data-driven solution to your language problems? It just so happens that there is such a solution... The use of CORPORA, or large, principled collections of electronically searchable text - has been proven to really help writers understand how language is actually used across a wide range of contexts. Advances in technology have now made it much easier to get online access to this kind of data, numbering in the millions (or even billions) of words. Better still, we can search for examples of language in use across different disciplines, like engineering, the arts, physics, and so on, ensuring we can use the right terminology for the subjects we are writing. By completing this course, you will be an expert at manipulating millions of words of academic writing data to provide all the answers you need to many problems you might be having with your writing, and boost your knowledge of academic words and phrases to improve your vocabulary and written fluency. You will also receive a certificate of completion for completing all the activities on this course (UQ students can use this as part of their 'Career Development Framework' acheivement).