Keywords are the words that academics use to reveal the internal structure of an author's
reasoning. While they are used primarily for
rhetoric
Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate parti ...
, they are also used in a strictly
grammatical sense for structural composition, reasoning, and comprehension. Indeed, they are
an essential part of any language.
There are many different types of keyword categories including: Conclusion, Continuation, Contrast,
Emphasis, Evidence, Illustration and Sequence. Each category serves its own function, as do the keywords
inside of a given category.
When someone uses a search engine, they type in one or more words describing what they are looking for:
'Norwich florist' or 'cheap holidays Greece', for example. These words or phrases are known as keywords.
Corpus linguistic keywords
In
corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language, study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feas ...
, key words are words that appear with statistically unusual frequency in a text
or a corpus of texts. They are identified by software that compares a word-list of the text with a word-list
based on a larger reference corpus. A suitable term for the phenomenon is
keyness. The procedure used,
for example by
WordSmith
A writer is a person who uses written words in different writing styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce different forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, books, poetry, travelogues, plays ...
, to list key words and phrases and plot where they appear in texts. These items
are very often of interest—particularly those human readers would not likely notice, such as prepositions,
time adverbs, and pronouns.
Teaching Keywords
One method used to teach keywords is called the "keyword method." It involves taking complex keywords that students do not know very well, and makes them into easier words. The easier words must have something to do with the complex keywords so students can correlate between the two.
References
*Scott, M. & Tribbe, C., 2006, ''Textual Patterns: keyword and corpus analysis in language education'', Amsterdam: Benjamins.
External links
Transitional Words and Phrases
Rhetoric
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