Gooseworld

Poetry by Marella Hoffma

Using Discourse Analysis Methodology to Teach Legal English

In this study, I propose a curriculum focused on raising students’ linguistic awareness through rigorous discourse analysis and reflective writing in a legal context. Students analyze authentic, full-text legal documents using discourse analysis methodology. By carefully analyzing the language in legal opinions, appellate briefs, law review articles, law school exams, typical commercial contracts, and statutes, students become experts in analyzing and evaluating legal texts. Students learn to manipulate legal language to achieve various desired linguistic and legal effects. This approach has three primary advantages. First, it forces the students to carefully read authentic legal texts. Second, it gives students the linguistic tools to talk about the effectiveness of texts. Third, it empowers students to criticize legal texts and concomitantly enables them to purposefully craft language to achieve a desired discourse message. These skills are wholly portable–both in law school and in law practice

Iterated functions and the Cantor set in one dimension

In this paper we consider the long-term behavior of points in ${\mathbb R}$ under iterations of continuous functions. We show that, given any Cantor set $\Lambda^*$ embedded in ${\mathbb R}$, there exists a continuous function $F^*:{\mathbb R}\to{\mathbb R}$ such that the points that are bounded under iterations of $F^*$ are just those points in $\Lambda^*$. In the course of this, we find a striking similarity between the way in which we construct the Cantor middle-thirds set, and the way in which we find the points bounded under iterations of certain continuous functions

There\u27s a Soldier

As the peircing north wind blew his icy gusts around the corners and swept the streets with his broomlike blasts, the people stamped their feet and drew their coats more closely about them. It seemed as though Wind and Sun were having a terrific argument and Wind was doing his utmost to win this battle. The crowd was beginning to lose a little of the feverish excitement that a military parade always seems to cause. Suddenly the strains of the national hymn were carried to their ears; and, forgetting the cold, the crowd cheered and sang as the band marched into sight. What a day for a parade! What a day for fighting; it seemed almost a Russian day