The paragraph below comes from Christian Rudder’s book Dataclysm. Assume that you want to use the material in this paragraph in a paper about the evolution of the English language. Under the paragraph is an excerpt from an annotated bibliography for this assignment. Read the annotated bibliography, and then create your own entry for the Rudder source. Fill in the textbox with a summary of the paragraph, highlighting the information that you might use in a paper. Don’t forget to evaluate the source, and include your reaction and analysis of the paragraph. If one particular sentence stands out as a valuable quote, you can include that—in quotation marks—as well.
Rudder, Christian. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Penguin Random House, 2014, p. 59.
When you want to learn about how people write, their unpolished, unguarded words are the best place to start, and we have reams of them. There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed. It’s the epitome of the new communication: short and in real time. Twitter was, in fact, the first service not only to encourage brevity and immediacy but to require them. Its prompt is “What’s happening?” and it gives users 140 characters to tell the world. And Twitter’s sudden popularity, as much as its sudden redefinition of writing, seemed to confirm the fear that the Internet was “killing out culture.” How could people continue to write well (and even think well) in this new confined space—what would become of a mind to restricted? The actor Ralph Fiennes spoke for many when he said, “You have only to look at Twitter to see evidence of the fact that a lot of English words that are used, say, in Shakespeare’s plays or P.G. Wodehouse novels … are so little used that people don’t even know what they mean now.”
Annotated Bibliography
Barnard, Alan. Language in Prehistory. Cambridge UP, 2016.
I can use this source to ground my paper, explaining the early shape of language. This will help underline the changes that I point out later.
Tallerman, Maggie and Kathleen R. K. Gibson. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution. Oxford UP, 2013.
This will be a central and important source. There is a lot of useful information here, but I need to be careful not to overuse this source. I should check the bibliography of this book for other potentially valuable sources.
Rudder, Christian. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Penguin Random House, 2014, p. 59.