VV064 Week 11
WRITING PRACTICE
Two basic writing techniques:
- Compare and contrast
- Point-by-point method vs. block method
Exercise 1: Go through the following three text and decide which writing techniques these texts
use:
Female infants speak sooner, have larger vocabularies, and rarely demonstrate speech defects.
(Stuttering, for instance, occurs almost exclusively among boys.) Girls exceed boys in language
abilities, and this early linguistic bias often prevails throughout life. Girls read sooner, learn foreign
languages more easily, and, as a result, are more likely to enter occupations involving language
mastery. Boys, in contrast, show an early visual superiority. They are also clumsier, performing poorly
at something like arranging a row of beads, but excel at other activities calling on total body
coordination. Their attentional mechanisms are also different. A boy will react to an inanimate object
as quickly as he will to a person. A male baby will often ignore the mother and babble to a blinking
light, fixate on a geometric figure, and at a later point, manipulate it and attempt to take it apart.
The streets are littered with cigarette and cigar butts, paper wrappings, particles of food, and dog
droppings. How long before they become indistinguishable from the gutters of medieval towns when
slop pails were emptied from the second-story windows? Thousands of New York women no longer
attend evening services in their churches. They fear assault as they walk the few steps from bus or
subway station to their apartment houses. The era of the medieval footpad has returned, and, as in
the Dark Ages, the cry for help brings no assistance, for even grown men know they would be cut
down before the police could arrive.
People should own boxers and underwear. When wearing boxers under pants, the boxers bunch up
in different places, forming little hills out of the pants. When wearing underwear under pants, they
do not bunch up, leaving the pants smooth. Boxers come up high on the waist, so people can see
them above the pants unless the shirt is tucked in, but underwear do not come up high on the waist,
so no one can see them above the pants. However, boxers can be worn without any clothes on top,
but this cannot be done with underwear. Wearing boxers without any pants on is very comfortable.
Underwear is very comfortable with pants on. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of each,
people should own both boxers and underwear.
2) The third passage from the previous exercise uses the block method. Rewrite it so that you use
the point-by-point method. You do not need to rewrite the whole text.
VV064 Week 11
Transitions
- Mr. Novák is a lawyer.
- His wife is a doctor.
- Mr. Novák is a lawyer, and so is his wife.
- Mr. Novák is a lawyer; his wife is not.
2) Combine the sentences into one sentence. Do not use the same transition more than once.
a) Dr. Vojtek has an excellent bedside manner.
Dr. Kristoffersson is rather distant.
b) The first house had almost no furniture, felt dark and cheerless and was badly in need of
painting.
The second apartment was furnished, had a lovely view and was nicely illuminated
due to its large windows.
c) In the United States, interest in soccer has been on the increase lately.
While baseball was a traditionally popular sport, it is slowly losing its viewers.
Important parts of abstracts:
- Background
- Method
- Results
- Conclusion
3) Take a look at the following abstract. Can you revise it?
In this paper an automated bathroom activity monitoring system based on acoustics is described.
The system is designed to recognize and classify major activities occurring within a bathroom based
on sound. Carefully designed HMM parameters using MFCC features are used for accurate and
robust bathroom sound event classification. Experiments to validate the utility of the system were
performed firstly in a constrained setting as a proof-of-concept and later in an actual trial involving
real people using their bathroom in the normal course of their daily lives. Preliminary results are
encouraging with the accuracy rate for most sound categories being above 84 percent. We sincerely
believe that the system contributes towards increased understanding of personal hygiene behavioral
problems that significantly affect both informal care-giving and clinical care of dementia patients.