Score!

Woohoo! The Discourse Analysis mid-term that I had this morning went great! There was only one question that I absolutely did not know the answer for (I couldn't remember what was mitigated in hortatory discourse - I filled in the blank with an "argh!"; that may be the answer, actually). There was also one that I was unsure of the answer (why knowledge of peak is useful in discourse analysis) but, upon discussing answers with fellow students after class, I think I got the general idea. A few of the questions asked for just 3 or 4 aspects of something for which I knew most or all of them so, as time allowed, I threw them in at the end of the space allowed for answering questions. Hopefully that will pad any holes in my basic answers of the questions. For example, Dr. Hwang asked about features of language that are not adequately addressed by basic grammatical analysis but need to be explained in relation to discourse features. She was looking for 3 or 4 areas but I know them all. So, I gave the few and wrote a bunch more.

I have secret tricks for studying that I used extensively in preparation for this exam.

1. Reduce as much information as possible to list form.
2. In red, underline the key trigger words in each list item.
3. Develop a mnemonic device (e.g. a poem, acronym, substituted sentence based on the acronym) for the really big lists.

Here are some of my lists and devices, to illustrate my method:

Question: What are some areas in which discourse analysis is necessary?

• The List
• articles and deictics
• pronoun use
• verb morphology: tense-aspect-mood
• deviation from standard word order
• adjuncts: optional? location and time give motion and flow
• adverbial clauses: discourse cohesion
• sequence signals and conjunctions
• nominalization and topicalization
• variation in reported speech forms
• length of syntactic units
• mystery particles and affixes

• The Red

articles and deictics
pronoun use
verb morphology: tense-aspect-mood
deviation from standard word order
adjuncts: optional? location and time give motion and flow
adverbial clauses: discourse cohesion
sequence signals and conjunctions
nominalization and topicalization
variation in reported speech forms
length of syntactic units
mystery particles and affixes

• The Mnemonic; has every feature in the list but in an example form

"When the talking and walking but being quiet has ended, he stands as Billy stood; in fancy pants, against the wall." Said she, "Oh, for true, eh?"

My mnemonic for Discourse types is a sentence: To Narrate someone's Behavior is the Procedure to Expose them.

Another mnemonic that I used was a poem which referenced all the possible features that might mark a Peak Episode:

• Blaow! Faster, bigger, crowded, eh?
• Yesterday becomes today
• You to I, they to she
• I look like you, it was seen by me
• and this, but that, asyndeton comma
• narra - pseudo - dia - drama
• Less repeating but more repetition?
• An episode in Peak Condition.

This, of course, makes sense to nobody but me. It doesn't need to. Rob wouldn't even let me use my mnemonics out loud when I was studying because he had a final exam in Phonetics this morning. He was afraid he'd be asked to write the technical name for a phonetic sound and the only thing that would come to his mind in that time of crisis would be "fancy pants".