Hello all,

Sorry for the massive delay in getting back to you, and thanks for the concern. It was a bit stressful writing the thing but I handed it in in January and have finally received the mark back (if not the dissertation itself...I am beginning to suspect they've lost it). In the end I got a 68 which is a high 2.i - not bad, and my marker commented on the 'uniform, coherant set of data'.

So thanks, this really couldn't have been done without you.

Kat (forthwritten)

Hiya,

It looks like I have enough people for this - thanks for helping out. Over the next week I'll be gathering data but as I've said before, I'll avoid using friends-only material unless your journal is completely locked.

Um, any questions, just ask.

Hello.

First of all, you're all lovely lovely people for helping me out. I've just had a meeting with my supervisor in which we discussed my methodology. To reassure you, it's basically looking at 'clusters' of things such as different nouns or verbs, different sentence constructions and so on - nothing involving content or reproducing your writing. If you want to read more it's found in Biber's Variations in Speech and Writing but frankly, it's a bit of a nightmare book. Great if you have trouble sleeping though!

Ideally I'd like a few more people (more variety and my research would be more accurate) so if you can, please let other people know about this. I'd be very grateful.

Hi,

I am a third year English student at the University of Liverpool, currently writing a dissertation on language and blogging. I'll be looking at the language people use to write their blog/journal and analysing it to see how blogs/journal fit into different frameworks that have already been established.

To do this I'd need to build up a collection of writing and this is where you can help. If you keep a blog or journal and write longish entries (over 300 words) I'd be really grateful if you could let me use some of your writing. I'll be looking at grammar and structuring rather than content - it's useful to me even if you write about what you had for tea last night. I will ask your permission to use any entries or extracts though.
Unfortunately I'll have to restrict this to people who speak British English because otherwise I'll end up introducing too many variables, but other than that there are no restrictions on age, sex, gender, education and so on.

If you're interested in helping me out, please let me know by leaving a comment here with a link to your journal. I'd appreciate if you added this journal (particularly if your journal is locked) because I'll be posting more stuff on here. I'll try to avoid using locked entries, and if you don't feel comfortable adding this it's fine not to as long as you check up on it sometimes.

Oh, and please pass this on if you can!

Thanks for reading,
Kat