Assignments? What assign...ah. Those assignments.

York in November, mmm.
Photo by dvdbramhall

It's week 5, but no blues this far north of Cambridge, excepting the stunningly blue sky we were treated to on Sunday morning (is it wrong to be a little bit smug that only the North was treated to it?)

Instead, week 5 is yellow and pink; yellow for the colour that all the lecturers seem to use for printing assignment details on, and pink for the "declaration of academic integrity" cover sheet with which I shall be much more familiar by the end of reading week, which is next week.

In fact, one assignment is floating about in the print cloud now, waiting for my attention. Don't worry, I'm not being especially virtuous, it's due a little bit earlier than the others (tomorrow, in fact). This one is for Psycholinguistics, two "one-page" answers about the Motor Theory of speech perception vs. the auditory theories and also about Newness vs. length and Heavy-NP shift in double object constructions (my old friend...) The actual topics aren't too bad, firstly because I find them incredibly interesting, and secondly because we're not actually expected to do research outside of class notes/the reading pack, in this instance at least. However, the main point of the exercise is something I find MUCH more challenging...being concise. I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that I'm a several-line sentence sinner (if Dickens can get away with so can I....can't I?) so I'm finding it very difficult to condense lots of information into one lone A4 page. Especially as there's so much to say!

This same challenge is to be repeated in my Language Acquisition assignment, due a week today. The second section is basically a summary of a study and its main components, 500 words. OK, I can squish that down relatively comfortably. But the first section? Find data of first language acquisition in a language other than English and apply any of the theories we've studied so far to it. I've chosen French (partially because I can actually understand it), and already I can see that there's just so much to say! Carefully choosing which aspect to focus on may not be so bad, as I'll partially be constrained by the data that I can get my mitts on - but only having 500 words again?! Oh word count, you are a cruel, cruel mistress.

At least that's my only problem - I am once more thanking my lucky stars for everything I learnt last year in the library as I blithely play with Metalib. Some of my coursemates thought that this was some kind of communicable disease. This won't be the case after tomorrow, as our subject liaison librarian is giving over 2 hours of her time to drag us all out of the Google mire, but I'm quite pleased to have a mini-headstart on the data rush.

Anyway, what am I doing here? I have pages to print, data to mine and some very odd phonetic-type things to do...which aren't getting done here. To work!

(P.S. I managed to get some Lindy in last weekend, toddling off to Leeds to dance the Tranky Doo with some very pleasant lindyhoppers led by Cat Foley. I've never done lindy a la Scouse before, but it was very entertaining! And here's what we did...)