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Does grammar matter?

22 April 2016

Andreea Calude

Dr Andreea Calude's TED-Ed looks at the difference between spoken and written language and how grammar fits in.

University of Waikato linguist Dr Andreea Calude’s TED-Ed picked up more than 100,000 views during its first 72 hours online, and since then, viewer numbers have kept on growing.

But getting the TED-Ed online was a feat in itself.

“I was watching a TED-Ed [a spin-off from TED Talks] and thought, ‘I’d like to do that’ and sent off my pitch to the TED-Ed people in New York. I wanted my TED-Ed to focus on grammar and the differences between written and spoken language,” says Dr Calude, a senior lecturer in general and applied linguistics.

The reply came back telling Dr Calude not to get too excited because they get thousands of pitches and few get picked up. But not long after that she received a message to say they were interested in her subject. She subsequently did a skype interview with a TED-Ed producer and got the go ahead to write an 800-word script for a non-specialist but intelligent audience.

“What I wrote went through about 10 drafts and changed a lot from what I’d imagined,” Dr Calude says. “It evolved into a nice piece on the differences between prescriptive and descriptive views of language.

“And then the animator came on board and that was exciting. I suggested possible animations, I had lots of pictures in my head, and so we worked together to complete the animation. That’s when the process quickened and there was a lot of back-and-forth discussions in a short time. In all, the process took six months. “It was so much fun,” Dr Calude says.

Here’s a link to Dr Calude’s TED-Ed, titled Does Grammar Matter? http://ed.ted.com/lessons/does-grammar-matter-andreea-s-calude

Alongside it, viewers can respond by answering questions about the subject or “dig deeper” to find out more, and participate in an online discussion.

Viewer numbers by today (Friday 22 April) totalled more than 300,000.

While she’s a principally a linguist, Dr Calude also has a maths degree and she’s just co-authored a paper for a new online publication called the Journal of Language Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, which combines her two interests; looking at how 81 Indo-European languages code numerals, and tracing the history of these words through time using phylogenetic methods used in biological evolution.