#explainling

July 2019 newletter: Because Internet is published and makes the NYT Bestseller list!

There was a New York Times Daily review of Because Internet (paper version!). Here’s one of the very nice things that reviewer Jennifer Szalai had to say about it:

McCulloch is such a disarming writer — lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject — that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.

There was also SO…

My newsletter for February 2019: Predictive text meme in Wired, galleys of Because Internet, and more interesting linguistics links!

My latest Wired article is about the appeal of the predictive text meme: we’ve gone from Damn You Autocorrect to treating the strip of three predicted words as a sort of wacky but charming oracle. Plus: I’ve officially got a Wired author sketch now!

I was also quoted in the Huffington Post about how we use okay vs ok vs k in workplace communication and profiled in Stylist France magazine(print,…

My newsletter for July 2017: teaching #LingComm class, attending #lingstitute, and crochet wug

This month, I was quoted in this New York Times article about how we type laughter online.

The tenth Lingthusiasm episode went up, about learning languages linguistically, and the Patreon bonus was about hypercorrection.

I taught a four-week class on communicating linguistics or LingComm at the LSA institute in Lexington, Kentucky.  The day-to-day class notes can be found on the @LingComm twitter…

Previously: LingComm day 1: Goals and #LingComm day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure

We started by looking through the twitter threads that people created from last time, talking about what was easy and difficult. You can see these threads on the #lingcomm hashtag -- there were some nice interactions with people outside the class too!  

We did an exercise on the curse of knowledge where one group tapped out a song and tried to get the other group to guess it. In the lab, researchers have found that about 40% of tappers think that their song is clear, while only 2.5% of guessers actually succeed in guessing it. Our percentages were slightly different than that because one group chose the song “We Will Rock You”, which of course has a distinctive clap pattern. (Very clever, dangit.)

We then talked through a few quotes from this article by Steven Pinker, which was the reading, about how already knowing things makes it hard to remember what it was like to know have known them. 

We looked at a couple approaches to fixing it, from the mechanistic (like up-goer five, which makes you use only the 1000 most common English words) to the imaginative (like having an “ideal reader” in mind who doesn’t have a background in the topic). 

Then we had a break for improv games! We started with a quick clap-passing game (synchro-clap) as a warmup, and then moved into telling a collaborative story one sentence at a time, three words at a time, and one word at a time. One of the key things about this game is not being a mind-reader: other people are going to take the story in different directions than you anticipated! 

Previously: LingComm day 1: Goals

We started with a discussion of how things went starting out on twitter and the doge article. The single, central piece of terminology in the doge article is “selectional restriction”, and I shared a story of how someone came up to me at a linguistics conference a year after the article came out, and said that their non-linguist friend had unexpectedly known what selectional restriction was, apparently just from reading the article, so we even know it worked as a teaching tool! We compared this to the opening paragraph about selection on Wikipedia, which is considerably drier and more dense with terminology. 

Here are a few core ideas that came up:  

“Concept first; jargon second” 

This paper describes an experiment where students in different sections of the same undergrad biology class were either given the jargon or the concepts first, and the concept-first group did 1.5 times to 2.5 times better on a later test.

There’s a good reason I have the job I do. 

My monthly newsletter for November 2016: #EmojiCon, Arrival movie & language disruption in OUP

This month, I attended the first EmojiCon in San Francisco. I gave a talk about the mistake people make in assuming that emoji are a language, and three paralinguistic things that emoji do instead (in column form, and here’s a visualization of it), and met a lot of interesting people. You can see livetweets from the event at the #EmojiCon hashtag and I’m quoted in this article about it for TIME.

I am doing some exciting teaching at linguistics institutes this summer and next summer! Here are my course titles and descriptions: 

Linguistics outreach: A practical approach to explaining linguistics to non-linguists

Course at the 2017 Linguistic Summer Institute (Lingstitute) in Kentucky Instructor: Gretchen McCulloch

Want to engage the public about linguistics but unsure about where to start?

This course will give you hands-on practice about what kinds of linguistics topics to explain, how to create explanations that are lively instead of dry, and what formats are available for explanation. A large portion of class time will consist of discussing the techniques and effectiveness of the readings, which will be real linguistics outreach texts such as blog posts, articles on news sites, comics, short videos, social media, podcasts, public speeches, and so on.

Participants will create their own linguistics outreach project in a format and on a topic of their choosing, such as a news article, blog post, Wikipedia article, short video, comic, podcast, detailed plan for an in-person event such as a booth or school classroom activity, or any other idea of interest! Participants will give constructive comments on each other's projects and have the chance to revise in response to feedback before all projects are shared online at the conclusion of the course.

This course is relevant to linguists at all levels, including both students and faculty who want to have a broader impact beyond the university, to those considering careers outside academia who want to explain linguistics to non-academic employers, and to those staying in academia who want to improve their explanations on grant applications and to colleagues in other departments.

The 2017 Lingstitute website doesn’t yet have individual course pages, but I’ll also be posting about the course as it happens, as a sort of meta-outreach. 

Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages

Workshop at CoLang 2016 in Alaska Instructors: Gretchen McCulloch & Lauren Gawne 

Wikipedia is the seventh most-visited site on the internet, and yet many of its articles about smaller languages are woefully incomplete — from only a few sentences long to a few paragraphs of uneven quality, without references. This workshop will give participants the skills to work with Wikipedia and other projects that use wiki formatting. Participants will learn how to edit information about their languages in dominant languages, and how to start Wikipedia in your own language.

There are four main student learning objectives:

Learn about the Wikipedia model, and how to use the interface

Learn how to edit information about your language in English Wikipedia

Learn how to use wikis to work on your own projects

Learn about using the Wikipedia Incubator to make a Wikipedia in your own language