The first assessable discussion of this unit focuses on nominal style and the extent to which nominalizations are essential to the discipline or type of discourse, or unnecessary to it. Your task is to find:

(i) a short paragraph in which nominalizations are part of the professional language of writers in the discipline (= essential nominalizations)

(ii) a short paragraph in which nominalizations are unnecessary for the communication, or perhaps a deliberate strategy to mask difficult information which will be unwelcome, for whatever reason (= nonessential nominalizations)

Post two initial contributions to the relevant forum, and respond to at least four postings from other students.

Your punctuation assignment is to repunctuate a passage from an Australian short story which has had all its punctuation removed.  Your punctuation should make the syntactic structure and meaning of the passage clear, while indicating features such as direct speech, titles, etc. 

Please insert your punctuation marks into the text itself, highlighting the letters/space around each mark to draw attention to your changes. In addition, you should provide a page of discussion  (no more than 500 words), explaining the choices you have made, in particular where you have chosen between different regional styles, and how the type of text (fiction) may have affected your punctuation choices.

Your task is to find two short pieces of electronic communication (say 2 to 3 sentences each), which contrast spoken and written styles of English as much as possible. They can be taken from any of the electronic media you access regularly.

The two pieces should be posted separately (in either order and on separate occasions if you wish), with a brief commentary (no more than 200 words) highlighting their spoken and written features respectively.

Post an initial contribution to the relevant forum, and respond to at least two postings of each type from other students.

OPTION 1: Promotional writing

Choose any two books, one (a) from the general trade area of publishing, the other (b) from the professional/educational area.

For each of them, write copy for

• the banner for electronic advertising
• the feature line for a single-page advertisement (or the front side of a leaflet/flyer).  You should also indicate in a couple of sentences what graphics you’d suggest to go with the feature line, to support the intended message and ensure its impact.
• two or three paragraphs for the back cover of the book

Then write no more than a page comparing the promotional strategies and the kinds of language you’ve used in each batch of copy.

OPTION 2: Scholarly editing

Project yourself into the role of an editorial project manager responsible for producing an anthology of scholarly articles in a particular field (in print or online).

Your task is to create a cohesive collection of fresh papers in a specialized field with which you are familiar.  Such papers often appear first in the “working papers” of a university or academic discipline, and are easily found on the web via a Google search >> working papers education/ geography/ linguistics.  You should select five interesting papers from at least two different sources publishing during the last five years, to make a coherent set with a common topic or theme. 

Option 2 consists of two parts:

1. Create a title for your anthology, and write an introduction of about 500 words, foregrounding the theme and the contribution of each paper to it.
2. Provide a page of notes on the style proposed for the anthology, so as to reconcile differences between the styles of the source publications.