First off, here is a picture of me in my hat:
For those of you who do not know, I studied English Language and Linguistics at Queen Mary University in London.
Now, I genuinely found it hard to believe that my dissertation seemed to go down well. Given the subject matter, I'm sure you'll see why. But, well, it did.
Thus, I thought I'd put it on here for general perusal. Perhaps it will make you laugh, perhaps you'll just wonder how the hell I managed to succeed academically with this. Well. You and me both.
The basic premise of my dissertation was that I was investigating what linguistic features were used within straight white boy texts - and whether this meant the "SWB" text could be constituted as a genre (defined from an ESP perspective, at least - see the full dissertation link below for more on this perspective).
The corpus I based this investigation upon came from this Tumblr blog.
To give a tiny bit of background information, the SWB text is defined by the blog runners as as message from a person:
“of any gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation that comes across a little too "keen" or "thirsty" or insists on sending unwanted nudes or inappropriately asking for them. Also the usage of terrible, crude, slightly hilarious pick-up lines”
What I found within the corpus: there were certain features present that appeared to show the "Straight White Boy" text as a genre. This led me to come up with the table below. The table shows the "move types" present, alongside their definitions and examples taken from the corpus I created:
It was interesting to note several recurring features - of which allowed me to come up with the final rhetorical move structure of a "SWB" text:
I thoroughly enjoyed my three years at Queen Mary University. Linguistics is definitely my
thing. Other than syntax, that is. Plus the fact I can't really tell you just what linguistics is,
exactly.
If you were interested in reading the whole thing, which provides a little more detail and
context, check it out here.
