Teaching Disciplinary Writing Using Google Ngrams

Teaching Disciplinary Writing Using Google Ngrams

Teaching Disciplinary Writing Using Google Ngrams

In this activity that I taught in an upper-level writing class, I asked students to search for keywords, terms, and concepts in their chosen disciplines using Google Ngrams, an online corpus and visualization tool. Working in small groups, students entered in words relevant to their disciplines, took screenshots of the graphs, which they copied and pasted in a collaborative Google Doc, and discussed patterns they noticed in the trends and frequencies of words over time. This assignment enabled students to visualize the patterns of language and discourse across academic disciplines, as terminologies and meanings shifted across both spatial and temporal dimensions.