Concordance Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to get you to focus on your system of writing and to see if any new tools can possibly make it better. There is one in particular, the concordance, that we feel could make it better, though you are welcome to write about other tools that you have found or that you use. What you will do is simple: spend some time examining what you do and how you do it; try using something new to help you do it; report to us, in essay form, what you did and how it worked.

Our favorite concordance, so far, is here: http://corpus.byu.edu/. It is not the only one but as far as we can tell it is the best one. We will spend some time in class showing you how to use it effectively. Your job is to try it and report to us how it worked. If it doesn’t work well, tell us why. Give us examples.

This essay is not due Feb. 25. But we want you to try to use new things that help your system, so we want you to have enough time. The concordance is useful in the problems you mentioned in the Writers’ problems assignment (see weblog); you don’t have to address the ones you mention, but try to use the concordance to make yourself a more effective writer. That’s the goal. Good luck!