Hello, Science!:
grammar

You never thought the semester would the end! But now that it is, you’re not sure you’re ready.

Final exam time is stressful whether you’re prepared are not. Often, stress is our worst enemy, but by making some smart, conscious choices, you will be on your way to a less stressful final’s week and a report card that won’t make you (or your parents) cringe.

Make a plan/schedule your time Being prepared for each of your finals is going to take time. And as final’s week approaches, every minute counts. Dust off your planner or open one of the many, free online scheduling tools available and make a plan. Just getting it all laid out on paper can really reduce your stress level. This can help you to see that you really do have enough time to get everything done. And even though you have to be flexible, if you follow your plan you will be more in control of your time and of your final grades.
Prioritize the work load Not all finals are created equal. There’s no doubt that you have a class or two that’s going to take more study time. This could be because the subject matter is just more difficult for you or it could be that you slacked off in the past and now have to buckle down to make the grade. Make conscience choices about what classes you’re going to need more study time for. This may be a tough decision, but making sure that you plan more study time for the classes that are going to be the toughest can lower your stress and help you be more successful with all of your finals.
Start small, start now We’ve all heard of the quintessential college student who waits until the last minute and then crams for his finals. How successful are these types of students? The best way to attack studying for finals is by doing a little bit each day, for each class. Try reading through your notes after class each day, making notes and highlighting to ensure that you stay engaged with the material. Go through the sections of the textbook that you will be tested on and read the headings, bolded words and highlighted sections, starting a couple of weeks before your finals. This repetition may seem boring, but you are actually studying when you do this, so you won’t have to stress out later as you cram.
Be Honest with Yourself We all have our own natural rhythm and working with that, instead of against it, is one of the ways to study smart, not hard. If you’re easily distracted, avoid going to busy coffee shops to study. On the other hand, if you need some background noise, the local coffee shop might actually be a helpful place to go. Often students claim that they studied all day for an exam and still didn’t pass it. But if they are honest with themselves, most of the time they didn’t choose a good time or place in which to study, or they allowed themselves to be distracted by social media, text, etc. So be honest with yourself. If you’re a morning person, get up a little earlier and study in the mornings. If you’re at your most alert in the evenings, study them. Turn off your cell phone and log out of all social media so that you aren’t tempted to use them to avoid studying. Remember, just because your book and notes are open, doesn’t mean you are actively studying!
Jacqueline Myers is a long-time college English instructor who provides expert tips, tricks and techniques for successful college writing and research at Nitty-Gritty English. Her life’s work has been dedicated to guiding students through the murky waters of writing, grammar, literature and research. Jacqueline is also a freelance writer/editor/researcher and is a proud contributor to AEGC.

ACL-IJCNLP 2009 and EMNLP 2009 have just finished here in Singapore. As an outsider to the field I had a hard time following many talks but nonetheless enjoyed the conference. The highlight for me was the talk by Richard Sproat who wondered whether there exists a statistical test to check if a series of symbol sequences is actually a language? If this test would exist, we could use it to decide whether the set of symbols known as the Indus Valey Script is actually a language. Very fascinating stuff: I immediately bought “Lost Languages” by Andrew Robinson to learn more about the history of deciphering dead languages.

The paper had some very cool papers; the first one I really liked was Bayesian Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Nested Pitman-Yor Language Modeling by Daichi Mochihashi et al. They build on the work of Yee Whye Teh and Sharon Goldwater who showed that Kneser-Ney language modelling is really an approximate version of a hierarchical Pitman-Yor based language model (HPYLM). The HPYLM starts from a unigram model over a fixed dictionary and hence doesn’t accommodate for out of vocabulary words. Daichi et al extended the HPYLM so that the base distribution is now an character infinity-gram that is itself an HPYLM (over characters). They call this model the nested HPYLM or NPYLM. There is no need for a vocabulary of words in the NPYLM, rather, the HPYLM base distribution is a distribution over arbitrary long strings. In addition the model will perform automatic word segmentation. The results are really promising: from their paper, consider the following unsegmented English text

lastly,shepicturedtoherselfhowthissamelittlesisterofhersw
ould,intheafter-time,beherselfagrownwoman;andhowshe
wouldkeep,throughallherriperyears,thesimpleandlovingh
eartofherchildhood:andhowshewouldgatheraboutherothe
rlittlechildren,andmaketheireyesbrightandeagerwithmany
astrangetale,perhapsevenwiththedreamofwonderlandoo
ngago:andhowshewouldfeelwithalltheirsimplesorrows,an
dndapleasureinalltheirsimplejoys,rememberingherownc
hild-life,andthehappysummerdays. […]

When the NPYLM is trained on this data, the following is found

last ly, she pictured to herself how this same little sis-
ter of her s would, inthe after - time, be herself agrown woman ; and how she would keep, through allher ripery ears, the simple and loving heart of her child hood : and how she would gather about her other little children,and make theireyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of wonderland of longago : and how she would feel with all their simple sorrow s, and a pleasure in all their simple joys, remember ing her own child - life, and thehappy summerday s.

• Minimized Models for Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging by Sujith Ravi et al.
• Polylingual Topic Models by David Mimno et al.
• Graphical Models over Multiple Strings by Markus Dreyer and Jason Eisner
• Bayesian Learning of a Tree Substitution Grammar by Matt Post and Daniel Gildea

I teach basic Freshman English at the college level, and every semester I have at least one student who complains, asking why he or she should have to take two semesters of English if it’s not his or her major. My answer is always the same – English isn’t the only major that requires you to write.

Even if you’re majoring in Mathematics, Engineering or the Sciences, you will still be required to write papers at some point – for conferences, exams, experiment proposals, job proposals, etc. Learning the proper way to write a term paper will go a long ways toward helping you sound competent in other writings. And while each type of writing and the different majors have their own specifics, there are some basic tips that can be used for almost any paper:

• Tip #1 – START EARLY! Yes, I realize that’s in all caps and yes, do please take it as me yelling at you. I’ve heard it all before – “I work best under pressure,” or “I have it all planned in my head, so writing it won’t be a problem.” Do you know the kind of papers I get from that? They’re not A-papers. Sometimes, they’re doing good to be C-papers. Start working on papers early. Spend time developing your argument and making sure it fits within the parameters of the assignment. Read any material or assignment sheets the professor has given you about the assignment to make sure you’ve planned for all the requirements – sources, citation style, length, topic, etc.

• T ip #2 – Outlines and Drafts – do them. You don’t have to do the traditional outline with Roman numerals and little letters, nor do you have to write a draft in correct order, but I advise you to get into the habit of doing some form of written pre-planning and draft work. Write the body of the essay first and then worry about the introduction and conclusion. Write the conclusion (what you want people to take away from the essay) and then work on the body to be sure you get there. Work on it in any order you want, but give yourself time to have a draft ready before the final version is due so that you can edit it.

• Tip #3 – Thesis – you should have one. This is the place where you identify your argument, the stance you’re taking in the paper. The basic five-paragraph essay we’re all taught in high school tells us that the thesis should be a single sentence at the end of the introduction paragraph. That’s not necessarily true once you get to college. You’re writing about more complex topics, so it stands to reason your thesis will be more complex. It may take more than one paragraph to introduce the topic. You may need more than one sentence to identify and outline your argument. A good way to start forming a thesis is to take the main question or topic assignment of the essay and reword it into a sentence. This way, you’re guaranteed that the essay will at least be addressing the assignment. Once you have this basic thesis in place, you can work to make it more specific or sophisticated to match the direction of your essay.

• Tip #4 – Introduction, Body, Conclusion, the Whole Shebang – One of the most common mistakes Freshmen writers make is to look at the minimum required limit, reach it and then stop. One of the reasons we require minimum lengths, either in words or pages, is because professors have learned that just saying “write until you’ve answered the assignment” will almost always get us at least one student who, either out of arrogance or obnoxiousness, will write a paragraph and feel they have handled the assignment. But just because you’ve reached the bottom of the fourth page (a free tip, if the assignment says at least 4pgs, that doesn’t mean three full pages and a paragraph on page 4 – go to the bottom of the page), as required, does not mean you’re done. You need to introduce the topic, discuss it, and then include a conclusion. You need to fully deal with the assignment. The introduction is the first few paragraphs where you outline and introduce the topic. The body is where you handle the discussion – examples, research, opinions, arguments. The conclusion isn’t a two line paragraph that you wrote when you realized you were at the base limit. It’s where you wrap up the argument. If you leave out any of these, your essay will feel as if it’s missing something.
  

• Tip #5 – Edit/Proofread. Most colleges will have some form of Writing Center or tutoring available for free to enrolled students. Usually, these will be manned by graduate students from the English department – make use of them. Take a draft of your work (or even go see them to help you get started with brainstorming or an outline) and let them look at it with you. Even if you don’t want to go see a tutor (or perhaps can’t because they’re not available), make an effort to proofread on your own. Give the essay to someone you trust to read and see if they get the point you’re trying to make. When we read our own work, we automatically fill in gaps or holes in the logic because we know what we’re trying to say or we know they’ll be addressed later – an outsider won’t have that knowledge and will only be able to tell you what they read, not what you intended to be on the page. Look for basic grammar errors – the little red or green squiggly lines in a word processing program help you identify those. Read the essay out loud – it’s easier to fix grammatical errors when we read silently, but when we read out loud, we’ll stumble over errors. Obvious grammatical or spelling errors (or even format errors such as spacing and margins) automatically set your essay off on a bad note. It tells your professor that you don’t care enough about the assignment to take care of the little things. If that’s the case, why should your professor care enough about the assignment to take the time to grade it?

The author, Ms. Laura Holder, currently teaches at a medium-sized state university, where she is a candidate for a PhD in English.