Acknowledgements - Language & Style

I would like to thank heartily the following individuals and institutions for helping me make a mad idea a reality.

Dawn Archer, Stef Strong, Dan McIntyre, Ben Short and Eszter McIntyre, the part-time research assistants who worked on the project with me from time to time, and who have made the site ‘dance’ so wonderfully, put in much more time and effort than they were paid for. They are ‘the ones wot did it’. I just provided the too-many-words that my students complain about.

During the teaching investigation I carried out using the web course, Leonard Cohen, Roger McGough, Harold Pinter and Willy Russell gave me free permission to use texts in copyright which they had written. I am advised now by Lancaster University’s legal advisers that I am able to make the site freely available to all without paying copyright fees because of the fair dealing exception for the purposes of criticism and review within the legislation (see the copyright declaration on this site). But nonetheless, I would like to thank publicly these wonderful writers for their initial generosity of mind, and I gratefully include them as sponsors of this site. Similarly, I would like to thank Oxford University Press (and Liz Mann in particular) for free permission to use a poem by Henry Reed. If I have accidentally missed anyone out of this list, I am more than willing to expand it. Please let me know!

The main funding for the course (and the pedagogical investigation I have used it for) was provided by my National Teaching Fellowship (2000) prize. The funding for the prize was provided by the Higher Education Funding Council through the Institute for Learning and Teaching.

Lancaster University’s Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching provided the funding to create the three self-assessment mechanisms (one at the end of each of the three literary genre-based sections of the course) to help students practise Stylistic Analysis.

Lancaster University’s Faculty of Social Sciences provided funding to help complete the teaching investigation I have used the site to conduct.

Professor Charles Alderson let us use a self-assessment template he had developed for the Dialang language self-assessment project.

Charles also provided a large amount of invaluable help and advice, including helping us to improve the template for use in our context lending us a research assistant from time to time.

Lancaster University’s Department of Linguistics and English Language provided free office space, computers, and other essentials during the 4-year period when the course was produced.

Lancaster University Television Unit (LUTV) and Mike O’Donoghue (Department of Educational Research) provided free help and advice with video and audio clips.

Dan McIntyre provided some of the drawings and cartoons for the site. The rest were provided by my long-suffering brother-in-law, A. J. (Ces) Brown.

Many, many people gave informal help and advice - too many to mention. But I would in particular like to thank Graeme Hughes, Alison Sharman, Hennie Yip, Mike Cowie and Damien Cashman. These wonderful IT experts put up with a lot from ignorant me!

Three Lancaster students, Helena Greenwood, Alessandro Mazzini and Carey Sveen acted out the extracts in the drama part of the course and provided me with free use of their video clips.

Heather Willis and Stephen Watson kindly sang the 'Corpus Christi' ballad for the audio-clip provided in Topic 3, session B

Some American Junior Year Abroad students recorded the extract from USA by John Dos Passos for me. I can’t find the record of their permission to let me use their recording at the moment and so can’t name them individually. I would be happy to do so if they get in touch.

David Hoover gave me ‘The Three Billy Goats Graff’ and some good advice too, and AhaJokes.com kindly allowed the use of some of their jokes within the site.

The entire 2001-2 class of Ling 131, Language and Style gave me free permission to use extracts from their essays to create the self-assessment mechanisms on the site.

Finally, I would like to thank all those colleagues and postgraduate students - and all very much friends - who have taught with me on the 'traditional' version of Language and Style since Mike Breen and I first created it in the late 1980s in the 'texts first' format it has had ever since. They have all helped to create the materials which I have adapted and built on for this web course. I will probably forget some of the course teachers by accident (in which case let me know, please!). In alphabetical order: Tom Barney, Carol Bellard-Thomson, Derek Bousfield, Mike Breen, Hywel Coleman, Jonathan Culpeper, John Heywood, Dan McIntyre, Hazel Medd, Judith Poole, Elena Semino, Stef Slembrouck, Angeliki Tzanne and others.

Thank you one and all!

Mick Short (July 2005)

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