The Academic Word List (AWL) – developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. 570 word families that appear frequently in academic texts, but are not in the most frequent 2000 English words. Divided into 10 sublists based on frequency.
Effective Use of Microsoft Word for Academic Writing – This looked helpful for a moment. I’m always up for learning better ways to wrangle Office products. And then I noticed it is a 1 hour, 24 minute video presentation. Which makes me want to run screaming.
I do not like information transfer regarding skills via “presentation.” You cannot skim over what you already know. The speed at which humans can speak and take in speech is frustratingly slow for this kind of information. It isn’t dense enough.
I am freshly irritated about this because I recently attended a 4 hour class in which I learned a small amount of content I could have sucked up myself in less than an hour. But I wouldn’t have gotten the practice at putting what I learned to use. Or so I have been telling myself.
But back to the topic at hand… this Word presentation is on ResearchChannel.org, which I have never seen before, as I don’t do TV (can’t sustain interest in any one show over a season).
Remarkable speakers, researchers and scholars present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries on ResearchChannel. The University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the National Science Foundation are just a few of the world-renowned institutions that participate and whose programs are featured.
Despite my frustration with presentation-watching, this may come in handy for keeping my brain occupied while I am exercising.
The Martini Method for finishing a PhD – Ha! No really, this blog–academicproductivity.com–looks like it might actually be good. Because the key to academic productivity is another blog to read… but no really! Look! The Interruptron is going on my computer tomorrow because since I’ve stopped tracking all of my time by the minute in a spreadsheet (and outputting pretty pivot charts to show how much time I spent brushing my teeth versus folding clothing), I haven’t been as good at maintaining a work/rest schedule and productivity has slipped a little. The Interruptron makes graphs. I love it already.
And now back to taking notes from the book I need to return to ILL tomorrow.