Faculty Retreat Lightning Talk

1. Using a Corpus as a Tool for
Writers:
MICUSP
Judy Dyer

2. What is a corpus?
A large selection of naturally
occurring spoken and/or written
language available in digital
format.
Corpora are a useful resource for
linguists, lexicographers,
teachers, and students because
they provide instant access to
large amounts of authentic

3. Examples of Corpora
 Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken
English (MICASE) 1.7 million word corpus of
transcribed lectures, discussion groups, etc.,
compiled by the English Language Institute at UM
 British National Corpus (BNC), a 100 million
word corpus of written (90%) and spoken (10%)
language, including telephone conversations,
novels, student papers, and many other genres.
 BYU Corpus of American English (BYU CAE),
a 360+ million word corpus of written and spoken
language.

4. MICUSP
 The Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student
Papers
 829 „A‟ grade papers (roughly 2.6 million words)
Range of disciplines across 4 academic divisions*
of the University of Michigan (U-M), Ann Arbor
(*Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological
and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences).
 It can be accessed through an online interface
called MICUSP Simple, available at:
http://search-micusp.elicorpora.info/simple

5. BROWSING PAPERS IN
MICUSP
16 DISCIPLINES PAPER TYPES
 Argumentative Essay
 Creative Writing
TEXTUAL FEATURES  Research Paper
 Abstract  Report
 Definitions  Critique/Evaluation
 Discussion of results  Response Paper
 Literature review  Proposal
 Methodology section
 Problem-solution pattern
 Reference to sources
STUDENT LEVELS
 Tables, graphs or figures  Final year undergraduate
students (level G0)
 1st, 2nd and 3rd year
graduate students (levels
G1, G2 & G3)

6. General Uses of MICUSP
 To search for use of particular word(s)
 To search for collocations of words i.e.
information about with which word(s) a particular
word co-occurs
 To search for examples of particular text types (a
research proposal in Biology, a report in
Psychology)
 To search for examples of features of texts (e.g.
abstracts in Biology research papers, definitions
in Mechanical Engineering, how to introduce a
figure or graph)
 To look at frequencies of a particular phrase/word

7. MICUSP Simple top screen

8. Interact with graphs

9. Use further filter options

10. Get instant information about papers

11. Potential uses for MICUSP
 I don‟t know how to use “nevertheless.” Does it
always go first in a sentence?
 Is it “different from” or “different to”?
 How do I introduce a figure or graph in a Poli Sci
paper?
 How do I write a lit review for a psychology
paper?
 How do I write a definition in a biology paper?
 Is it ok to use “I” in a Mechanical Engineering
report?

12. Acknowledgments
 The Michigan Corpus Linguistics Team
(Ute Roemer and Matt O‟Donnell)
 John Swales – the initiator of corpus linguistics at
Michigan and a great educator and inspiration.

13. What is a Concordancer?
 Software which can be used to search, access,
and analyze language from a corpus.
 Useful in exploring the relationships between
words, and can provide information about the way
language is used.
 A concordancer allows us to enter a word or
phrase, and search for multiple examples of how
that word or phrase is used in everyday speech
or writing.