July 2019: Because Internet is published and makes the NYT Bestseller list!
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!). Hereâs one of the very nice things that reviewer Jennifer Szalai had to say about it:
McCulloch is such a disarming writer â lucid, friendly, unequivocally excited about her subject â that I began to marvel at the flexibility of the online language she describes, with its numerous shades of subtlety.
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February 2019: Predictive text meme in Wired and galleys of Because Internet
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: weâve gone from Damn You Autocorrect to treating the strip of three predicted words as a sort of wacky but charming oracle. Plus: Iâve 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,âŚ
July 2017: teaching #LingComm class, attending #lingstitute, and a crochet wug
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 twitterâŚ
#LingComm day 3: The Curse of Knowledge and short talks
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! Â
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 âWe Will Rock Youâ, 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.Â
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 âideal readerâ in mind who doesnât have a background in the topic).Â
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!Â
We then watched a couple video clips of short linguistics talks: the three-minute thesis and two-minute thesis by Sara Ciesielski
This video by Tom Scott, which explains 4 linguistic concepts in under 4 minutes.Â
These particular two examples are a good contrast of two distinct styles of lingcomm that are both effective: the thesis explainer has a relaxed pace and uses vivid stories without much terminology or visuals, while the features video has a quick pace, lots of visuals, many terms, and doesnât really tell stories. But theyâre both engaging to listen to, start where the listener is at, and donât rely on the listener remembering the meaning of a whole bunch of new terms, even when they introduce them (low cognitive load). Â
There are also a couple supplementary videos which we didnât get to but which Iâd recommend, especially if youâre following along with this class from afar: this three-minute thesis talk about tones in Cantonese heritage speakers, this video about overcoming the curse of knowledge in three-minute thesis talks and other common difficulties, and this video explaining a neuroscience concept at 5 levels of difficulty.Â
The in-class exercise was to talk through how youâd explain a more difficult or challenging concept, such as your own research or a paper youâve recently read.Â
Next class is going to be about debunking myths and changing minds. Reading is this handbook on debunking and homework is to explain a non-basic linguistics topic on twitter (such as your own research or a reading you have for another class), using images such as screenshots, photos, and/or gifs.Â
#LingComm day 2: Terminology and the explainer structure
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 âselectional restrictionâ, 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.Â
Here are a few core ideas that came up: Â
âConcept first; jargon secondâÂ
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.
Terminology must be core to the explanation, not incidental to itÂ
Unfamiliar acronyms, IPA symbols, and technical terms all count as terminology: you get one piece of terminology per explanation, maybe two if they directly contrast. Many concepts can even be explained without any new terminology at all. Instead of acronyms, use generic nouns (âthe associationâ, âthe theoryâ). If youâre going to define something in passing (e.g. âsemantics, the study of meaningâ), you might as well just use the gloss (âmeaningâ) rather than impose additional cognitive load on your reader or listener.Â
ExamplesÂ
Make your examples memorable, even funny if possible. Finding a joke or at least a vivid example that hinges on structural ambiguity, violation of Gricean maxims, or whatever concept youâre trying to introduce, is a more effective means of making people retain the ideas than deliberately making examples as vanilla as possible, which is what we often end up doing.Â
Structure of an âexplainerâ piece:Â
Lede
âNut grafâ (âIn-a-nutshell paragraph)
Body
KickerÂ
(Full post about the âexplainerâ structure.)Â
Why am I learning this?
We also listened to two introductions of constituency tests, one from 16:06-20:45 of episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, and one from the standard classroom model as represented by 9:17-10:15 of this video), to talk about motivating the need for a concept before you introduce it, rather than jumping right into the âtestableâ material.Â
Practice
We then played an improv game involving passing an invisible ball, which changed size and weight and eventually morphed into other objects, including a frisbee, a baby, and a shark. This game practises connection, paying attention to your audience, and structured spontaneity - the students interact with the âballâ in a spontaneous sort of way, but the progression of ball to more challenging object follows a sort of story arc.Â
I then split the students into small groups where they put the explainer ideas into practice by re-framing the hour-long institute forum lecture from Thursday into a short explanation suitable for a conversation with a random non-linguist you might run into. We ended up with two different frames around the topic of entrainment or accommodation: one group talked about talking like a chameleon while another group framed it in terms of why Siri is annoying.Â
Structural notes: this class exposed a weakness of the twitter-thread-as-slides idea, in that when I was preparing it I realized that there were a few things I wanted to reorder after the fact. But presenting them in the class itself went fine, and this is having the nice side effect that the students are getting practice finding things in twitter threads and hashtags. (And honestly, sometimes you end up teaching things in a different order than the best-laid slidedeck plans anyway.)
The practice part took longer than expected, so we didnât get to the curse of knowledge, but thatâll be a good topic to start with for the next class. Assigned reading is this article by Steven Pinker but if you canât get to the whole thing, just read the screencapped portions here and here. Homework is to make several tweets in the #lingcomm hashtag explaining a small basic linguistics concept. If you can work out how to thread them (by replying to yourself in a chain), thatâs great, if not weâll discuss threading next class.Â
I also announced that office hours will be on Thursdays from 10:30-12:30 am in the Starbucks in the library.Â
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November 2016: EmojiCon, Arrival movie, and language disruption in OUP
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 hereâs a visualization of it), and met a lot of interesting people. You can see livetweets from the event at the #EmojiCon hashtag and Iâm 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:Â
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 doesnât yet have individual course pages, but Iâll also be posting about the course as it happens, as a sort of meta-outreach.Â
Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages
Workshop at CoLang 2016 in Alaska
Instructors: Gretchen McCulloch & Lauren GawneÂ
Wikipedia is the seventh most-visited site on the internet, and yet many of its articles about smaller languages are woefully incomplete â 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
Hereâs the CoLang course page with more details. I believe CoLang registration is now closed, but weâll also be putting resources from this course online.Â