Language; television

[sister_luck]

Marking makes me cranky. After reading lots of weird sentences I'm sure that my instincts fail me completely and I end up questioning everything. Aided by a bilingual dictionary my students come up with the most outrageous translations - we were only allowed a monolingual one back in the day and it's rather difficult to convince my students that the bilingual dictionary is no big help if you end up using the completely wrong words and then I'm having to sort out what they meant to say in the first place.

Then there's collocations. I'm rather wary of the phrases that have crept into the English as taught by German teachers that are not quite the right usage and I'm always afraid I'm doing the same. (Hell, I know I've done it - I used to think that you could hold a speech and it didn't mean having your hands on the manuscript but actually like giving it.) So, at the moment I'm struggling with advertising language and the AIDA formula and asking myself what kind of verbs go with the nouns attention (attract, grab, draw attention to), interest (attract and what else?), desire (wake?) and action (take, that's easy!). I'm thoroughly confusing myself here.

Tomorrow I'll watch rugby on tv, because I can.

I've watched the season premiere of Heroes which was okay, but Mohinder is really annoying me, Dexter which piled on the pressure for our serial killer and a rather self-indulgent but kind of endearing special about Ian Rankin's Edinburgh.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Heroes was so so for me. I agree about Mohinder. Noah rocks though.

Speaking of Rankin's Edinburgh, have you seen Reichenbach Falls?

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

There was a ad for it at the end of the Rankin programme saying it was based on one of his ideas. I made a joke about how he had been drinking in a pub with a tv producer/writer and that's how they came up with the idea, but that's all I know about it. Is it worth checking out?

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

gah, an ad - *hangs head in shame*

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

It's interesting and worth watching if you aren't spoiled about the main twist, could have been better though. The whole thing looks like a big joke but the acting makes you feel for the character.

The lead is that pretty Scottish actor who starred in "Dune" and played Drogyn in "Angel"...which is the reason I downloaded the film!

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We might have to try it then. I'll let you know what I thought.

[avriisme.livejournal.com]

Oh god. The AIDA Formel. I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. Also, you do know that no English person has a clue what it means, right? Even though it is English in the first place (or the acronym is in English at least). Lol. I only know it because our 'genius' (errr...) of a German tutor in my final year at university decided that we were going to spend an entire two semesters on 'Communication', which basically involved doing exactly what we'd done in the first year, but with slightly harder vocabulary (i.e. the set phrases she wanted us to use). This, as opposed to actually doing things that would encourage us to improve our German, as we'd done with a different tutor the previous year. Aaaanyyyway....

What I was going to say was that you've already got just about everything you could say, but maybe also:

To catch or capture someone's attention? But draw and attract are probably best. Grab is maybe a little informal, but if it's not in an essay it'd be fine.

You could say 'create interest', I guess... 'this creates / provokes / inspires interest in the product'.

Something 'awakens a desire', is the one we always used when discussing it in English because no one could really think of anything else. That's a difficult one to find synonyms for. 'Creates a desire', I suppose too, or 'provokes' again, though that's maybe a bit strong there.

You could definitely say something 'provokes action' though, but more likely something 'provokes someone to take action', which is what you already have, so....

[avriisme.livejournal.com]

or on that last one 'inspires someone to take action / buy the product'

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

LOL - I was a bit skeptical about AIDA, but it's a good way to get students to analyse advertisements. It's even got its own English wikipedia entry, but then one of the books referenced was published in German which kind of isn't a good sign of its wolrdwide acceptance...

Thanks for your input - I always have problems with 'wake' and 'awaken' and the difference in usage of the two words. I find that 'catching someone's attention' often makes for awkward sentences.

[stormwreath.livejournal.com]

It's even got its own English wikipedia entry, but then one of the books referenced was published in German which kind of isn't a good sign of its wolrdwide acceptance...

I learned the AIDA mnemonic while I was studying marketing; I'd always thought of it as technical jargon of no interest to anybody outside the advertising industry. :-) Apparently it dates back to the 1920s. A more recent version is "Unawareness-Awareness-Comprehension-Conviction-Action" which unfortunately doesn't have a catchy acronym, so is less famous.

How's it used in Germany?

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

So, it is a bona fide marketing term! Good to know that it's not complete bullshit (though most of marketing and advertising isn't too far off that mark anyway).

I first encountered the AIDA formula in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks for German students to help them analyse advertising, because that's part of the whole language analysis stuff that we make our students do - most of the time in a rather strange English for Academic Purposes as you'll see from some of my other posts.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem in Dutch. Sentence after sentence, and test after test I notice the same spelling mistakes and suddenly I wonder if I wrote it wrong on the black board.

And than the sentences where I know it's wrong, but don't know how to say it right either, because I've been reading crooked Dutch for so long.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I do know the difference between "then" and "than", but my fingers don't.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I do get confused with German as well but as a native speaker I feel a bit more confident about my language instincts - and of course, in this particular course I have to fiddle with nearly every sentence.

Oh, and it's a common occurence that when you're writing about the linguistic mishaps of others you make at least one mistake of your own. There's a word for it, but I can't find it right now. It's somewhere on languagelog (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/).