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GCSE English Language - Assessment objectives - handout

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Parts of Speech - Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs

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Describing Words

The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the " HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books!

Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files - mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.

Hopefully it's more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way - for example, gender is interesting: " woman" versus " man" and " boy" versus " girl". On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, "beautiful" is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world's literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for "woman" - too many to show here).

The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The "uniqueness" sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives' uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it's actually pretty simple). As you'd expect, you can click the "Sort By Usage Frequency" button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.

Please note that Describing Words uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.

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The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it's like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the " HasProperty" API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word.

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The Hero's Journey: article + short videos

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The Hero's Journey: article + short videos

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There are many ways to structure a great story. One of the most popular, though, is also one of the oldest.

I'm talking, of course, about the Hero's Journey. Originally outlined in Joseph Campbell's seminal 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the monomyth (now known as the Hero's Journey) applies not only to enduring mythological stories that are thousands of years old, but also many of the greatest films ever made.

If you're familiar with films like Star Wars, Casablanca, Lord of the Rings, O Brother Where Art Thou, or The Matrix, then you've seen the Hero's Journey in action.

Animating The Hero's Journey

With that in mind, there are a pair of incredible animations that I'd like to share with you today, both of which shed light on the mechanics of the Hero's Journey, breaking it down into its individual elements so that you can better understand how to implement it into your own stories if you so choose.

The first comes from Iskander Krayenbosch, a talented motion designer whose colorful interpretation of the Hero's Journey features countless examples from famous films. Check it out:

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The 12 Steps of the Hero's Journey: A Crash Course In Structuring Compelling Stories - Filmmaker Freedom

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I'm talking, of course, about the Hero's Journey. Originally outlined in Joseph Campbell's seminal 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the monomyth (now known as the Hero's Journey) applies not only to enduring mythological stories that are thousands of years old, but also many of the greatest films ever made.

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'Netflix's Myths & Monsters' - short video

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'Netflix's Myths & Monsters' - short video

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Netflix's Myths & Monsters: Joseph Campbell & The Hero's Journey ("Heroes & Villains," S1E1)

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I am an English teacher dedicated to making AQA GCSE English Language and Literature easy to understand. My videos break down challenging concepts into simple steps to help you succeed. Check out mrbruff.com/proof for evidence of how my content can impact your exam results! TikTok: @mrbruff Twitter/X: @mrbruffenglish Buy my revision guides in paperback on Amazon*: Mr Bruff’s Guide to GCSE English Language https://amzn.to/2GvPrTV Mr Bruff’s Guide to GCSE English Literature https://amzn.to/2POt3V7 Power and Conflict poetry guide (ebook) https://bit.ly/2PS8bw6 Mr Bruff’s Guide to ‘Macbeth’ https://amzn.to/2GxYO5p Mr Bruff’s Guide to ‘An Inspector Calls’ https://amzn.to/2GxXJKT Mr Bruff’s Guide to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ https://amzn.to/2GvL0s5 Mr Bruff’s Guide to Grammar: https://amzn.to/2GJCBSj and many more titles!

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"how to study literature" "how to pass exams" "how to write essays" "how to pass gcse" "english lessons" "english language" "how to write description" "how t...

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So glad you found me! Do you want to get a brilliant understanding of Language or literature? Macbeth, poetry, Jekyll and Hyde, the AQA exam, how to write descriptions, stories, articles, or persuasive writing? Do you want to dramatically improve your grade? Welcome to Top Grades Made Easy.

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Relevant Skills

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Paper 1 Question 5: Descriptive Writing

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Paper 1 Question 5: Narrative and Descriptive Writing

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For world leaders, journalists, CEOs, or anyone who has ever had to explain a dicey report card, word selection can have an enormous impact on how a message is perceived.

Does it make any difference whether a presentation went versus pretty good, or if an earnings report is described as versus ? As Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley explains, according to a new survey from YouGov, word sentiment isn't as cut-and-dry as one would expect.

THE UNITED STATES OF SENTIMENT

Certain words more precisely communicate positive and negative feelings.

Interestingly, very bad edges out words like abysmal and dreadful as the most conclusively negative phrase for those survey respondents based in the United States.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
On the positive end of the spectrum, perfect was most conclusively positive term.

EFFECTIVE WORDS: U.K. EDITION

The version of the survey conducted in the United Kingdom reveals interesting differences in how words are perceived.

In the U.K. visualization, words have a more defined "hump", meaning that people tended to agreed on where each word fell on the 10-point scale. As well, there appears to be more mutually agreed upon nuance. The U.S. results showed less agreement on words that weren't on the extreme ends of the sentiment spectrum.

In both regions, the word average was nearly dead-center on the graph and had the highest percentage of people agreeing on its score.

QUANTIFYING LANGUAGE

It's human nature to attempt to tame complexity and bring order to chaos. Language, with its fluidity and openness to interpretation, has always presented a tempting challenge.

To this end, researchers have developed lists that ascribe a sentiment score to specific words. Using data mining techniques, it's possible to gauge the tone of a piece of writing.

One compelling example of this is a project by data analyst, Susan Li, who ran a sentiment analysis on Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letters, and found that the majority of the letters had a positive tone.

The one outlier? 2001, which was a challenging year for a number of reasons.

As these techniques continue to evolve, we are likely to better understand why one person's abysmal is another person's very bad.

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Sentiment Scale Reveals Which Words Pack The Most Punch

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For world leaders, journalists, CEOs, or anyone who has ever had to explain a dicey report card, word selection can have an enormous impact on how a message is perceived. Does it make any difference whether a presentation went versus pretty good , or if an earnings report is described as versus ?