Activity 1: Producing a simple concordance
Hannah
Hannah is a university research assistant, hoping to get an article about the research project she is involved with published in an academic journal. She has prepared a first draft of the article and has shown it to her supervisor. He has suggested that she makes some revisions and one of the things she has been told is not to overuse the word 'furthermore'.
Hannah has decided to find out more information about the use of furthermore. A useful way for her to do this is to produce a concordance for this word using an online concordancer. She has chosen a concordancer which can search online newspaper websites for examples of the word.
Study this concordance for the word furthermore that Hannah has found. What could she learn about the use of this word from these examples? Identify three facts about the use of furthermore and note them in the text box. Then check your answer.
1. ... 53 per cent of Americans were opposed to drilling in ANWR while only
35 per cent supported the move. Furthermore, 73 per cent
thought the issue too important to be attached to a budget package ...
2. ... are arriving in school already familiar with computers, how will that
alter the way they learn to read and write? Furthermore,
there is the loaded question of which books should be read in schools ...
3. ... Emailing them is a simple and direct way of getting feedback, or you
can arrange to see the person direct. Furthermore, in your
department you will have a personal tutor (two if you are a Joint Honours
student) who is there ...
4. ... Dawkins' book seems, at least implicitly, to undermine Darwin's moral
evaluation of the character of evolution. Furthermore, he
believes that the core of Darwin's theory ...
5. ... reports that BNFL continues to claim that it will be able to secure
enough contracts to keep the plant going: "Furthermore,
their assessment indicates that it would be much more expensive to close the
plant immediately than to continue operating." ...
6. ... saying that it has a private garden when in fact there is a public
right of way across the land. Furthermore, under the terms
of the act, they can no longer flannel their way around this by simply omitting
to mention ...
7. ... Another problem facing recruiters is that science doesn't tend to be
seen as a sexy career option, and furthermore, many young
people haven't even heard of biomedical science. ...
Hannah knows that that there are some alternatives to using furthermore in her text. She has identified the three possible alternatives below but is not sure whether they would be appropriate substitutes.
- moreover
- in addition
- besides
She now wishes to check which of these she could use in place of furthermore by searching for some examples to study their use.
Follow this procedure yourself to carry out the concordances that Hannah ran. Explore the use of the three possible alternatives to furthermore by running a concordance for each one.
Use the link to the WebCorp concordancer below and then select these options to produce a concordance:
WebCorp
Advanced Concordancing
http://www.webcorp.org.uk/wcadvanced.html [No
responsibility is taken for content or information contained on external web
pages]
1. Search Term: moreover
2. Search Engine: Google
3. Case options: Case Insensitive
4. Output Format: HTML
5. Web Addresses (URLs): Show for concordance lines
6. Concordance span: 20
7. Number of Concordance Lines: Unlimited
8. Site Domain: (leave this blank)
9. Newspaper Domains: UK broadsheets
10. Textual Domain: All
11. Word Filter: (leave this blank)
12. Pages Last Modified: in the past month
13. Leave the rest of the options blank
14. Select 'Submit'
15. Wait for the concordances to download
16. Study the examples containing the expression (highlighted in red) to find
the chief characteristics of its use
17. Follow this same procedure to run a concordance for the other two possible
alternatives: in addition and besides
Look at the three characteristics of furthermore again and on the basis of what you have learned from the concordances produced for moreover, in addition and besides, select a tick if the same characteristics apply to the three possible alternatives and a cross if not.
It is normally used at the beginning of a clause or sentence.
besides
in addition
moreover
It is followed by a comma.
besides
in addition
moreover
It is used to introduce additional ideas within a sentence or paragraph.
besides
in addition
moreover
