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Adverbs for Hedging (Linguistics 12) Using Starting Lines & Exploring Options in Academic Writing by Jan Frodesen Below is a lesson plan by Ingrid Bowman, a sublimely talented lecturer in the EMS program, on helping students using hedging language in their academic writing.  This piece would be incredibly useful to all Linguistics 12, Writing 1, and Writing 2 instructors. ~Chris Dean Objective: To transform generalizations that arise in students’ academic writing through overuse of adverbs such as never, always or totally. By the end of this lesson, successful students will recognize typical frequency adverbs commonly used in academic writing to limit or qualify statements (i.e. hedging) and revise a piece of their own writing to avoid generalizations. 1. Language Input: Jan Frodesen’s book has an excellent overview of hedging and frequency adverbs (see pages 191- 195) for the Instructor to reference and offer input to the students. These pages are also useful to highlight and discuss the word order of such adverbs in the sentence. (For...

Advertisements are everywhere in our lives, but do you know that a lot of the products are being advertised and promoted by the marketers in certain ways that will appeal to specific groups of people? The impact it causes on society is what we often see nowadays: gender stereotypes. Our society has been putting "tags" of gender differences on both men and women. The majority of us have started to unconsciously accept and follow the "ideal images" created by those who have intended to impose these tags. Both women and men are being told by advertisements to have specific characteristicsand to behave in certain waysin order to become a “perfect” person of their own gender. Those who don't fit in with the "ideal images" will be seen as less of a man or woman. Let’s see how advertisements portray ideal gender images and how they define “attractiveness” for both men and women. In advertisements for makeup products, skin products, fashions, etc., their target group  is women. They are trying to convince female...

52% of video game playersare female. Does that surprise you? The video game industry is a booming business and one of the largest media outlets in society, influencing everyone in some shape or form. We have all played some sort of video game, whether online or on our phones. However, just like in real life, gender roles and stereotypes are still prevalent in the video game community. How does it affect the individual experience when playing? How do video games affect our perception of gender? Video Game Characters Any great game has decent, relatable characters that capture the audience. However, when it comes to male or female characters, our social perceptions of gender come into play as well. An anthropological study from the University of Amsterdam analyzed the difference between male and female characters from a variety of games and has concluded that media can influence social perception of gender. Video games are seen as a predominately male activityand are advertised for a male audience....