AI Shows Linguistic Experience essential for Language Skills—Not Grammar Knowledge

“Children should be seen, not heard” goes the old saying, but the latest AI language models suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, children need to be engaged in the back-and-forth of conversation as much as possible to help them develop their language skills. Linguistic experience—not grammar—is key to becoming a competent language user.

Morten Christiansen & Pablo Contreras Kallens writing in Fast Company

19 free (mostly one hour) Journalism courses

Free short online courses to strengthen your skills and add a line to your resume. Most of these Poynter courses are one-hour in length or less.

Journalism Fundamentals: Craft & Values - A five-hour, self-directed course that covers basics in five areas: newsgathering, interviewing, ethics, law and diversity.

Telling Stories with Sound - Learn the fundamentals of audio reporting and editing in this self-directed course.

How to Spot Misinformation Online - Learn simple digital literacy skills to outsmart algorithms, detect falsehoods and make decisions based on factual information

Understanding Title IX - This course is designed to help journalists understand the applications of Title IX.

Clear, Strong Writing for Broadcast Journalism - One-hour video tutorial

Powerful Writing: Leverage Your Video and Sound - In this one-hour video tutorial, early-career journalists will learn how to seamlessly combine audio, video and copy in captivating news packages.

Writing for the Ear - In this five-part course, you’ll learn everything you need to write more effective audio narratives.

Fact-Check It: Digital Tools to Verify Everything Online 

News Sense: The Building Blocks of News - What makes an idea or event a news story?

Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More - Finding and fixing the most common style, grammar and punctuation errors.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Fabrication - For authors, editors, educators, journalists, journalism students, news producers and news consumers

The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use

Ethics of Journalism Build or refine your process for making ethical decisions

Conducting Interviews that Matter  

Make Design More Inclusive: Defeat Unconscious Bias in Visuals

Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Publishers -Three important areas of media law that specifically relate to gathering information and publishing online: defamation, privacy and copyright

Freedom of Information and Your Right to Know -How to use the Freedom of Information Act, Public Records Laws and Open Meetings Laws to uphold your right to know the government’s actions

Journalism and Trauma - How traumatic stress affects victims and how to interview trauma victims with compassion and respect

How Any Journalist Can Earn Trust (International Edition) -What news audiences in various parts of the world don’t understand about how journalism works

Grammatical correctness ≠ Voice

The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.

What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. 

One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. 

Louis Menard writing in The New Yorker

Prescriptive Grammar Rules

Most of the hobgoblins of a contemporary prescriptive grammar (don’t split infinitives, don’t end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to eighteenth-century fads.

Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not – whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. 

But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very heard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it. 

Since perspective rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble. 

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

Articles of Interest about Lit, Journalism, Writing & Languages - Sept 3

***GRAMMAR

Trump’s Twitter War on Spelling  New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us/politics/trump-twitter.html

AP Stylebook Changes Hyphen Guidance, Ushering In Total Chaos  The Big Lead

https://thebiglead.com/2019/08/28/ap-stylebook-hyphen-change-guidance

In Love With Language, but Not Necessarily With Each Other  New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/books/review/the-grammarians-cathleen-schine.html

***WRITING & READING 

What Critics of Student Writing Get Wrong  Chronicle of Higher Ed

https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Critics-of-Student/247054

How I’m using AI to write my next novel  Vox

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/30/20840194/ai-art-fiction-writing-language-gpt-2

Cracking the code of dyslexia  CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cracking-the-code-of-dyslexia/

***JOURNALISM

How Colombia’s Datasketch wants to make data visualization easier for Latin American newsrooms

www.storybench.org/how-colombias-datasketch-wants-to-make-data-visualization-easier-for-latin-american-newsrooms/

At Least 11 Journalists Killed This Year In Mexico  NPR

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/31/756200213/at-least-11-journalists-killed-this-year-in-mexico

You might make a good producer if...  RTDNA

https://rtdna.org/article/you_might_make_a_good_producer_if

Why Teens Are Creating Their Own News Outlets  Teen Vogue

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-creating-own-news-outlets-instagram-text-message

The New York Times use of FOIAs  New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/reader-center/foia-freedom-of-information-public-records.html

***JOURNALISM STUDENTS

Hey, future journalists: 50 pieces of advice for making your college years count  RTDNA https://rtdna.org/article/hey_future_journalists_50_pieces_of_advice_for_making_your_college_years_count

Ability to adapt has become more important than ever for journalism interns  Community Newspapers https://communitynewspapers.com/featured/ability-to-adapt-has-become-more-important-than-ever-for-journalism-interns /

***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM

Obituaries keep local newspapers afloat

https://www.axios.com/obituaries-local-newspapers-77ddfa04-b54e-46ee-9fb7-a2aa641559fb.html

***FAKE NEWS

These “Canadian” Websites And Facebook Pages Are Actually Run From Overseas

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/canadian-websites-and-facebook-pages-run-overseas

Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can on how not to get scammed  Vox

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/8/29/20836745/frank-abagnale-scam-me-if-you-can

Inside the deeply weird fake seed scams that are all over Amazon Mashable

https://mashable.com/article/fake-seed-scam-amazon-ebay/

Hijacked Reviews on Amazon Can Trick Shoppers Consumer Reports

https://www.consumerreports.org/customer-reviews-ratings/hijacked-reviews-on-amazon-can-trick-shoppers/

These deepfakes of Bill Hader are absolutely terrifying  CNET

https://www.cnet.com/news/these-deepfakes-of-bill-hader-are-absolutely-terrifying/

***SOCIAL MEDIA

Researchers studying Facebook's impact on democracy threaten to quit  Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election-research/researchers-studying-facebooks-impact-on-democracy-threaten-to-quit-idUSKCN1VI04F

Here’s how to filter and delete your old tweets — and why that’s an OK thing to do  Poynter

https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2019/heres-how-to-filter-and-delete-your-old-tweets-and-why-thats-an-ok-thing-to-do /

What drives our addiction to social media  The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/23/social-media-addiction-gambling

***LANGUAGE 

A new book spells out the magic of language  Economist

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/08/22/a-new-book-spells-out-the-magic-of-language

What’s the best way to teach children a second language? New research produces surprising results The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/whats-the-best-way-to-teach-children-a-second-language-new-research-produces-surprising-results-122059

***LITERATURE 

Artificial Intelligence doing Wonders in the Field of Literature  Analytics Insight

https://www.analyticsinsight.net/artificial-intelligence-doing-wonders-in-the-field-of-literature/

Emojis Are Language Too: A Linguist Says Internet-Speak Isn’t Such a Bad Thing  New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/books/review/because-internet-gretchen-mcculloch.html

7 Best Places for Literature Lovers in Paris  Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com/7-best-places-literature-lovers-paris-1456124

***POETRY

Waffle House has an official poet laureate: For real  Atlanta Magazine

https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/waffle-house-has-an-official-poet-laureate-for-real /

In the first trailer for Apple TV Plus’ Dickinson, the famous poet gets turnt  The Verge

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833766/apple-tv-plus-emily-dickinson-series-trailer-first-look-hailee-steinfeld

This Indianapolis nurse quit her job to become a poet. Now people hire her to write poems  Indy Star

https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/08/30/indianapolis-woman-leaves-nursing-pursue-poetry-full-time-feel-heal-poetry/1930922001 /

Do You Actually Know The Difference Between Taylor Swift And History's Greatest Poets?  BuzzFeed  

https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/taylor-swift-lyrics-famous-poets-quiz

Butchering poetry: Verse vs. worse  Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weingarten-who-is-the-better-poet-gene-and-his-editor-face-off/2019/08/30/0d909a14-b9d7-11e9-bad6-609f75bfd97f_story.html