7/05/2012: Quest and Search Over the past half a week I have been scouring leads looking for possible questions we want to ask people about them. Our main focus is on the writing but we realize that this survey will be very subjective. Even I have noticed that it is harder for me to find good sports articles because I’m not very interested in them. Somehow we need to take that into account when we are asking these questions. However, our main hope is that there will be leads that everyone likes and find entertaining, and we are hoping that these are the best written leads. While looking at a bunch of leads I tried to figure out what I liked about different leads and what were the differences in writing. I came up with quite a few questions about whether the lead was informational or entertaining, whether the author used unique or creative phrasing, does the topic of the article impact your interest, and do you want to read the rest of the article?
Also I started searching for the phrases throughout the corpus. In light of the festivities of the 4th I think I may have jumped into the task without thinking about it. I started from the top of my list. After getting through the first two categories NL and FNL, who the most part have fixed phrasing, I realized that these phrases were so specific that their meaning didn’t change in different contexts. With the exception of a few, it was really the phrasal verbs that tended to change meaning based on sentences. These were the phrases that had non-literal and literal meanings. However it was too late for me to start on those. Over the tedious course of collecting these other sentences, I realized that the process would be much easier if I had the leads one sentence per line instead of one paragraph per line.