Department of Linguistics
A NATIONAL BULLETIN ON ISSUES IN
AUSTRALIAN STYLE AND ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA
| Volume 16 No 2 | December 2009 |
EDITORIAL: Adam SmithMany thanks to all the readers who have expressed their pleasure at the return of Australian Style, and those who have offered suggestions for improvements to the online edition. One of the most common requests was for a printable version of the newsletter, for those who find reading online difficult, or like the portability and convenience of hard copy. We’ve supplied a PDF version of this and the previous edition for this purpose. Please bear in mind that this cannot include all the content of the online edition, and a few articles are shortened or omitted. We have supplied a printable version of the Feedback questionnaire in the current PDF, realising that some of you might prefer to fill it out that way. Hopefully we have ironed out most of the frustrations you had with the online survey. We received 210 Feedback responses, which was very satisfactory for our first foray into the electronic medium, but would like to increase this number along with our online readership. There are currently some 1100 email addresses on our contact list, for people who’ve asked to receive notifications of new editions or updates. If you would like your email added, or think we might have an old address for you, please send a message to adam.smith@mq.edu.au. We’d also like to have you input in the form of questions about usage. Letters to the Editor is one forum for this, and you’ll find some interesting responses to the question about ship naming conventions from the last issue. Also, if any readers would like to contribute a short piece on a new word, or one with an interesting history, for our word column, we’d be happy to consider it for publication. I hope you find this issue an interesting one. Michael Haugh’s lead article describes the important initiative for a national Australian corpus, and we have articles by Jan Tent and Julia Miller based on their presentations at the recent Australex conference in Sydney. Along with the other regular features, you will find some additions to the PDF archive, which takes us back to 1999. Wishing you all a happy Christmas and New Year. The next edition is planned for June 2010. |