giovedì 16 aprile 2009

academic vs creative style?


Since I am preparing my exam for English Medieval Literature, the research article I have come across is about a Norwegian project titled MEG, Middle English Grammar.
The purpose of the project is to transcribe 1000 original medieval texts and then transform them into digital texts. In 2006, the MEG project was funded by the Research Council of Norway for about 6.1 million NOK.
For much grammar and the history of the Middle Ages might seem boring to me, last semester I had the opportunity of attending the course of Germanic philology at the University of Padova. According to the Oxford Advanced learner’s dictionary, philology is the scientific study of the development of language or of a particular language. The course study was really useful because I could study in depth the history and language of the Nordic countries and of Germanic people. This gave me the basis to understand some aspects of English Medieval Literature, and the Middle Ages history became even more interesting and clearer. Moreover, according to the research article I found, MEG project’s group of researchers at the University of Stavanger in Norway have recently created a collection of texts from the Middle Ages which has been transcribed on the University web pages. Let’s see how and when the research started.
Few years ago, two philologists from Stavanger begun travelling around Britain in order to study handwritten manuscript from the 1300-1500. Today, other master students, post doctors and professors from both Norway and Britain, in particular the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, also participate in the team work.
Therefore, through computer technology, the goal of their research has always been to create a database filled with all thousands of text in order to make it function as a kind of dictionary. Just to make few examples, it would be easier to see all variants of a word or how language changes in time and even to make researches quicker.
So far, I have made a brief description of the main aspects of the article which available at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080923140838.htm
As to text structure, in truth, the article is adapted material from the original one. Anyway, it presents a number of ideas which are reliable and worth of analysis. The article does presents the hourglass structure because it starts with a general introduction, then it explains in details the fields of study of the research and finally ends up telling what is the purpose and utility of the research.
Now, I was asked to analyze the structure of my research article and to answer if a blog post should follow some of the points I used for telling you about the article, that is: hourglass structure, logical flow of ideas, text cohesion, clear or complex writing. In my opinion, I think the structure of a blog post should always follow the first three points above and be clear. However, in my opinion, a personal blog is always something free depending on one’s own creativity only. According to this creativity, one can decide how to communicate with other people.
Finally, something for my peers: we were asked to find an academic research article, study its structure, writing, style. Now I don’t think any of us is writing their posts in an academic style or something. Since I still believe our blog is free and expression of our creativity, does creativity obeys to any academic rules? Obviously, if one wants to communicate in an effective way must be coherent, cohesive, clear, etc. but you learn it even at the high school.
See you soon and give me feedback if you want, that is what I really need!

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