25. 01. 2007 Interdisciplinary aspects- Text technology
Learner's diary
First of all we had a long discussion on the use of our portfolio. As if Prof. could read our minds, today's lesson started with the background to our portfolio and the motivation to create one as it is some kind of applied text linguistics and therefore belongs to today's topic.
Further, we talked about how linguists apply text theory proffesionally. He once again told us why many companies like Bertelsmann hire linguists, as they know for example about text construction.
The way how normal people and linguists differ is obviously while they are processing a document, as normal people only think about the appearance of a word and not about the meaning or the formulation. Only linguists know that formulation is even more important than the appearance.
The formulation is the structure of a text. You can divide a text into the front matter and the text body. The front matter is subdivided into title, subtititle, author and version. The text body is subdivided into different sections, which all have their own heading and own text.
There are three types of text objects, characters, paragraphs and figures. You can also have lists in your document, which are either ordered (numbered list) or unordered (bullet list).
In tables you have different properties, header rows, content rows, colums and cells.
For figures you should use a formatted numbering as is numbers the figures automaticly and if you change the figures the numbers will change as well.
It is unprofessional to change paragraphs by using the "bold" and "centred", you should rather use "Formatvorlage" as you do not have to change every paragraph separately and additionally it saves time.
Although I already knew a bit about formatting, I found today's lecture quite helpfull and I hope I will remember the things I learned today when writing my next document.
References
Homework
- What are text objects? Name two, and give typical properties.
- character: font and size
- paragraph: spacing, line
- What are document objects? Name one and give typical properties.
- document: name, author, version
- What are paragraph styles? Name two types of paragraph
- For each type, give their typical properties
- title: predefined but modified
- subtitle: predefined but modified
