dissection of the english language through visual thinking.

In Yesterday afternoon's visual thinking workshop, we explored the english language and the meanings of words.

points we covered included:

-the definition of words:

verb: a "doing" word

adverb: a word which describes a verb (ad(jective)+verb)

noun: a person/animal/place/thing/idea.

pronoun: he/which/you/he/she/us (used to condense a sentence)- a generalisation, group of people

subjective personal pronoun: i/one/you/he/she/it/we/person/number- more specific to a singular person/group

adjective: a descriptive word.

Then, we on to disect certain words from a sentence, and deciding into which of the categories (above) that each word fit, and, in groups, we wrote our own sentence which was to include a noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, and adverb. The sentence that Baljeet and I constructed was (very simply!):

"He sat cautiously upon the rickety chair".

Our workshop then progressed onto the practice of condensing text.

We looked at two articles, the first, from yesterday's Metro newspaper, with an article entitled 'Katei reads up as  Matt 'kicks off'', relating to an X-Factor tabloid-esque story, written by Andrei Harmsworth, and then condensed this to 140 characters, the number of characters that a twitter "tweet" allows.

We then went on to do the same with the article 'Fergie stays silent over Roo reports" in the same newspaper (written by Kevin Aitken), but this time condensing to 160 characters- the same number as a standard text message.

I found both excercises of the day genuinely helpful, and I feel that I have come back from the session really having gained something.

The definition of words in the english language was a really good reminder and re-cap from the two years I have spent since my A2 english language lessons at school, and will certainly be put into practice over the next three years at University, and, of course, through my career and every day life.

It was also really interesting to condense the two articles as it made us really work to get a grasp of the bare essentials of the stories, in a way which would communicate efficently and effectively- a practice which is used every single day through graphic design.

Bring on next week's session!