Media Texts and Language Interventions: helpful article

It's probably too late for this year's A2 students to get much out of this link, because you really should have handed in your coursework by now, but this article (which I've nabbed from a suggestion by Julie Blake on the Teachit Language Sputnik) offers a very readable explanation of what's needed in good science journalism.

As Julie points out over on her site, a Media Text (B spec) or Language Intervention (A spec) is often concerned with making a difficult, quite specialist idea accessible for a mainstream, non-specialist audience, very much like science journalism has to do. The article gives some helpful pointers as to what you can do.

LOL For The Win

The OED's decision to add LOL, OMG and the verb to heart to its latest update has already been covered here on this blog, but this BBC News Magazine piece about LOL is a really good read, not just for its content but also its form and style, which make it a neat example of how a Language Intervention (ENGA4) or Media Text (ENGB4) might work. It's also a good example of the sort of short article that can appear on the ENGA3 paper for Language Change, offering plenty of scope for discussion about attitudes to change, reasons for change and processes that help changes spread.

Texting: too many LOLZ, not enough R&J

As mentioned on here many times before, the USA has caught onto texting a bit later than us in the UK, so the moral panics about texting and literacy, texting and repetitive thumb injuries and texting and attention spans have hit their media fairly recently. I'm only saying this again to cling on to a deeply pathetic sense of superiority over this one tiny achievement when, in all other fields, the USA beats our increasingly rubbish country.

This article in the Seattle Times takes a look at the ways in which the language of texting is leaking into some students' written work and the concerns that have been raised about this. It's a good article because there's some attention given to less hysterical viewpoints, and even the students quoted are honest when they admit that sometimes they're just lazy and CBA 2 switch styles.

It's also quite a good style model for an ENGA4 Language Intervention or an ENGB4 Media Text, I think.

If you are looking for more articles about texting, click on the texting label at the end of this post and you'll find loads more.

Media texts and Language interventions

As loads of A level Language students (and teachers) are currently looking for style models to use for the A and B spec A2 coursework, I thought I'd try to make the search a bit easier by pulling together links to articles and stories that might be good to use.

I'll try to group these into broad areas that have been helpful for me in the past, but if you'd like to suggest other categories or argue about how I've grouped or defined these, just say.


Op-eds (opinion/comment pieces by named writers)

• Zoe Williams on slang that demeans women
• Zoe Williams attacks the word "chav" and all it stands for
• Paul Flynn on the word "chav"
• Beatrice Bray on words to define mental illnesses
• David Mitchell on language change
• Richard Littlejohn on "gollywog"
• Mad Melanie Phillips on "gollywog"
• Hannah Pool on "gollywog"
• Ziauddin Sardar on the place of political correctness in language
• David Gelernter on the perils of PC
• Anti-ebonics op-ed
• Max Davidson on slang 
• Christopher Howse on new words and dictionaries
• SFX blog post which links to several pieces by Simon Heffer about language
• Dr Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society bemoans low standards in English
• Henry Hitchings (author of Language Wars) on changing London dialect
• Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph on why change is bad
• I h8 text messages: John Humphrys gets mad in the Daily Fail
• Cn u txt?: John Sutherland savages texting in The Guardian (2002)
• 2b or not 2b: David Crystal argues that texting isn't all bad
• The end of handwriting: Boris Johnson on the rise of technology and the end of writing

News stories

• "Man on the Street" offensive to women
•  The Sun on "youth"
• Texting is good for you
• Texting is bad for you
• Texting is edumacational
• Studying texting is dumbing down 
• More on texting and literacy (readers' comments range from hysterical to offensive)
• The Sun on slang (image file) 
• A strangely popular article about the rise of "regional super-accents". With pictures of Cheryl Cole.
• Twitter and regional dialect in the USA (thanks to Ant's blog)

Feature articles

• "Gang slang" in The Evening Standard (nothing to do with gangs really, but there you go...) and an op-ed response in The Voice
• Lucy Tobin on "student slang" (again, not really about "student" slang per se, but worth a look...)
• Anna Leach on geekspeak and the language l33t (really good article!)
• Seattle Times piece on worries over text language

• General advice from Tim Radford on writing about science for a non-specialist audience: useful tips

OK, that's a start for now, and I'll add more over the coming days. You can also look for the blog posts where these articles were first mentioned by putting various keywords and phrases such as language intervention, media text, style models, texting, slang, new words, political correctness in the search bar on the top left of the screen, or by clicking on the labels below.

You might also find this link helpful as it gives more info about what an op-ed is. I've always told my students it's an opinion editorial, but this link says that's not the case. Ho hum.

This is quite interesting on different types of feature article too.

Let's get retarded...

...or rather, if you're the Black Eyed Peas and worried about not getting your single played "Let's get it started". The word "retard" has come under scrutiny in the USA with the debate about its offensiveness or otherwise gaining a political dimension recently. In this Washington Post article (a great style model for an AQA A Language Intervention or an AQA B Media Text) Christopher Fairman traces the word's history and the arguments about its use.

I don't know if this is something that the USA has been late to pick up on (a bit retarded, you could say) but retard has been pretty offensive in the UK for some time now. In much the same way that spastic was a term of playground abuse until we were all told off for using it, retard has always been a bit contentious. For example, I'd find it pretty hard to imagine a disability rights group in the UK calling itself the Association for Retarded Citizens. But then again, the expression spaz also hit the headlines a while ago in the USA, a good two decades after a school assembly from my old headteacher reminded us all that it was a bad word. 

In his article, Fairman makes some very good points about the cycles words go through and the euphemism treadmill that turns to generate new terms which - for a short time at least - avoid offence to different groups of people:

The irony is that the use of "mental retardation" and its variants was originally an attempt to convey greater dignity and respect than previous labels had. While the verb "retard" -- meaning to delay or hinder -- has roots in the 15th century, its use in reference to mental development didn't occur until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when medical texts began to describe children with "retarded mental development," "retarded children" and "mentally retarded patients." By the 1960s, "mental retardation" became the preferred medical term, gradually replacing previous diagnostic standards such as "idiot," "imbecile" and "moron" -- terms that had come to carry pejorative connotations. 

What's also interesting is the parallel Fairman draws with other potentially offensive words such as nigger, queer and gay. And while Fairman is sensitive to retard's offensiveness, his point is that we are grown up enough to show discretion and judgement in how we choose to use terms:

The current public awareness campaign surrounding the use of the word "gay" offers better lessons and parallels for the R-word debate. Advocacy groups contend that the phrase "that's so gay" fosters homophobia and that anti-gay language is directly related to violence and harassment against homosexuals. At the same time, there is recognition that much anti-gay language is uttered carelessly and isn't necessarily intended as hurtful -- as is probably the case with uses of "retard." The Ad Council and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have developed a Web site, ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, that, much like R-Word.org, encourages the public to sign a pledge to cease using the phrase. (The slogan: "Saying that's so gay is so yesterday.")

By increasing sensitivity and awareness, the campaign hopes to encourage people to think about the possible consequences of their word choices. Such reflection would presumably lead individuals to censor themselves once they understand that others can be hurt by their language.

Inherent in this idea is the realization that words have multiple meanings and that those meanings depend on the context and circumstances surrounding any particular statement. For example, "gay" is a term of identification for homosexuals, but it also can be used as an all-purpose put-down: "That's so gay." Those using it as an insult don't intend to say "that's so homosexual," nor do they necessarily make the conscious leap that homosexuality is bad. (Indeed, the success of the ThinkB4YouSpeak.com campaign depends on this distinction.)