Wednesday 28 January 2015

New tales from the word-face

It has been a long time. But slow (infinitesimally slow, a cross between Zenoic [I doubt if there‘s any point looking for that in a dictionary of all places] and Brownian motion]) progress is being made with The Second  Book. I‘m not trying to replicate the processes I used for WVGTbook. I‘m seeing What‘s Out There (quite a lot, and some of it even works), and what can be done with it.

The software assistance can be great fun, notably predictive text. I have mentioned before the hypersensitivity of my keyboard, and its tendency to latch on to one letter. The predictive text thingy goes out of its way to suggest improvements. My favourite so  far is this:

But, progress: I‘ve found something that converts XLS files to HTML, and after several attempts I think I‘ve got to a stage of usability. Here was the first try:
proofOfConcept.html
Promising

          <digression>
(and by the way interesting – the /w/ phoneme  sometimes, and more or less systematically [when it does]  makes the vowel sound it precedes behave differently: ban can tan ... etc but swan and wan, calm farm marm ... etc but swarm and warmbap cap tap ... etc but swap [WAP  is exceptional, like some other acronyms],  carp harp tarp ... etc but warp, and so on. But this does not happen invariably: back knack sack ... etc but no change for quack or whack...)
           </digression>

but not  much of a  prognosticator for heavy work. So I moved on to poc2.html.

One of the problems with the first book was the coding of the notes; the indices weren‘t hotlinks to the  notes (which I think would make it more likely that the notes would be read). This was a shame, as I think the notes are ‘the  best bit‘. In my XLS file (using Google Sheets and not Excel) I attached notes to individual words as XLS Comments, hoping that the converter would do something sensible with them (rather than just dropping them into the bit-bucket, as it did – oh well, I‘ll just  have to  keep playing). Here it is without notes:

poc2.html

Anyway, tempus, predictably, has fugitted. I just wanted to  let people know the game was afoot.

b


Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.







Monday 26 January 2015

You say /espǝræntǝʊ/ ...

... and I say /esperɑ:ntǝʊ/. These were two of the pronunciations I  heard on Radio 4 this morning. Which underlines a problem with trying to create a 'universal language': it can't be done. The people who insisted on the /ɑ:/ did not try to do anything outlandish to the uniquely English /ǝʊ/, though I imagine there are carefully-spoken Esperantists who give it an [ɔ] (or whatever it's supposed to be).

In my pre-1966 boyhood (the date will have resonance for Roman Catholics living through the revolution that replaced the Latin Mass with the vernacular Mass, following the 2nd Ecumenical Council called by Pope John XXIII) I often heard the argument
 'That's the wonderful thing about having the liturgy in Latin: any member of the Faithful anywhere in the world can go into a church anywhere else in the world and feel at home.'
Erm... no they couldn't.  And people who said they could were either telling a pious lie (which I'm sure they believed), or were linguistically insensitive on an epic scale, or both.

This 'argument' was very popular among traditionalists opposed to the introduction of the vernacular Mass, But it holds very little, if any, water, as this  reminiscence shows:

<autobiographical_note> 
During an exchange visit to a family living in Motteville, I went to a French church. I was an altar-boy (and fully paid-up member of the Guild of St Stephen to boot, I'll have you know), as I've said elsewhere, and knew the Latin Mass by heart. But it wasn't until the altar-boy rang the bell at the end of the 'Mass of the Catechumens' (the bell that signals
 <Hocus_Pocus interesting tidbit="1655 usage note†">
'OK, we've come to the Really Secret stuff, so if you haven't been baptized  you know where the door is' [that's a fairly loose interpretation,  but you get the gist]
</Hocus_Pocus>
 ) that I had any idea where the ceremony had got to; we  had arrived late, as Madame had a lot of children to organize, without the help of Monsieur, whose sole contribution to the family atmosphere seemed to be to sit at the table before meals shouting 'On a faim'. 
</autobiographical_note> 
This is what happens when anyone tries to impose a universal language; because of local accidents of pronunciation and context, the beautiful system breaks down into a babble of mutually-incomprehensible dialects.
<PS>
Incidentally, I can't stand the French pronunciation of the Latin à la française, although that [y] was more than likely what Fauré had in mind for his various liturgical settings.
</PS>
Of course, Esperanto limps on; listen to the programme. But it never lived up to the dreams of L. L Zamenhof (its creator). And although articles like this big up its numerical importance, one can't but agree with that programme's conclusion: if you want a common language, learn English (which is just as well, since foreign language learning in the UK [to any useful level] seems to be the privilege of a dwindling minority of the [largely] privately-educated.)

b

Update 2015.01.27.10:15 – added note:

† In fact, it's just struck me that that supposed derivation from the crucial words of the Consecration of the Eucharist makes my choice of tag-name strangely apposite. (I say 'supposed' because the fact of its having been written down doesn't  cut much ice; in 1655 people were quite capable of preserving in aspic a piece of folk etymology [which may, in this case, it seems to me, be more ben trovato than vero]).

Update 2015.03.22.22:40 – added PS
PS
And there's another pregnant coincidence, given the etymological link between crucial and crucify.

Monday 19 January 2015

Ursine sylvan defecation mystery solved

My attention was caught today by this tweet:

As the tweet suggested, the headline 'finding' was hardly surprising. But I wanted to know just how it had been reached. So I had a look at the survey here

The article introduces the survey like this:
Nearly seven out of 10 middle and high school students in South Korea are dissatisfied with English lessons at school because they are too focused on grammar, a study showed Wednesday. [Break for frankly pointless picture of SOMEONE'S HANDS IN THE ACT OF  WRITING SOMETHING] Based on a survey of 990 students attending middle and high schools in Seoul, the study showed 67.5 percent of them were discontented with the way English is taught at school.
My first impression [apart from 'Gosh – only two-thirds of  school kids don't like prescriptive rules; what a bunch of conformist drones' ] was that it could do with some images more eye-catching than the frankly pitiful ones supplied by the Korea Herald. So I knocked this one up without thinking too much [at first] about the message it conveys:



The first thing that leapt out of this picture was that the respondents (and, more importantly, the people asking the questions) saw only about two-thirds of language in terms of the four skills traditionally considered by language teachers  Speaking, Writing, Reading, and Listening (or, for lovers of mnemonics, SWhiRL). Personally, I can't conceive of teaching any of those skills without some vocabulary to start with, and without some way of choosing how to organize those words into meaning-bearing utterances (LS) or sentences (RW).

So it seems that this survey says more about pedagogy in S. Korea.  How do you learn vocabulary without any of the four productive/receptive skills? Presumably it is an entirely solitary and reflective process. And the same goes for grammar. How lucky I am not to have been exposed to that sort of regime.

There's a message here for language teachers: 

DON'T TRY TO TEACH EITHER OF THOSE YELLOW THINGS
WITHOUT A SOLID GROUNDING IN 
 ONE OR MORE OF THE BLUE ONES.

You won't get anywhere and your students will quickly side with the malcontents.

But I don't see what else can be gleaned from the survey. There seems to be a great deal of confusion over what was being asked – what students liked, what they valued, what they saw as being valued by some other stakeholder (parents, teachers, examination authorities, potential employers...). The article doesn't say, and I suspect I'd have to learn Korean to read the original.

b

Update 2015.01.21.18:20 – A  few cosmetic tweaks.



Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.








Wednesday 14 January 2015

The prophetic fallacy

In my year-end post I said
A happy New Year to  all our readers (a growing number, averaging about 35 visits a day).
Footfall (eyefall?)  has been markedly higher in the first two weeks  of 2015: a smidgen under 50 (49.85, as of midday on the 14th).

I wonder why. And it‘s not a steady 40-60 per day. Yesterday was 82, the day before was 23. So I had a look at the stats, to try to make sense of – and ultimately encourage – the difference.

What made the difference yesterday is apparent from this screenshot (provided here as an  excuse to try out the Prt Scr key (which, unlike its Windows analogue, does what it says – a novel idea for us WinFoible habitués):

Daily count of visits (that's an Internet-day)

And the post that jumps out (like a sore thumb, perhaps)...
<digression> 
Incidentally, in a decree issued on the first day after the Glorious Revolution that elevates me to my rightful place of benign dictatorship, the words ‘IF THAT MAKES SENSE‘ will be strongly discouraged (on pain of... something fairly painful... [I haven't thought the details through yet]). If something runs the risk of not making sense, it‘s probably best to do your audience the common courtesy of  PUTTING IT ANOTHER WAY.
         </digression>

...is a short piece called The swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune which, as fortune would have it, starts with the strangely apposite words ‘Apologies for the recent bloggopause. It's over a week since my last post ...‘. I can find nothing particularly ‘of its time‘  in that post (that might explain its sudden popularity), but perhaps the gods of bloggery ...
<digression type="P5S">
On the analogy of the Roman house gods perhaps these should be called the  Blares?
</digression>
...used that statistical spike to prod me (see what I did there?) into action before the 7-day counter ticks  over. 

b
PS:

Temporary (I hope) note on the TES stats 

The good folks of TESconnect are in a state – one might call it a TEStizz.  There's a big migration afoot, and their weekly stats mails have dried up. The usually prompt (and human) response from their HELP line has been replaced by an automatically-generated, largely content-free sop. I'll save you the bother of trawling through this screed, and give you the gist:

  • A mega-'port'† is in progress
  • Some stuff is up  and running on the new system
  • But yours isn't
  • TOUGH
  • Everything should be hunky dory in due course
  • Hang in there
  • Meanwhile, get off our backs
So the numbers in the last para of the footer haven't been updated for a month. Sorry.


PPS Here's a little something to make up for it:

Contrabandist - eg Zatopek. (3-6)

Update 2015.01.14.15:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS To give a better idea of the scope and nature of the TES thing, I've created this word-cloud of key words in the TES mail:


Get the picture?

Update 22015.01.14.16:40 – Added this note:

Excuse the lapse into techno-babble. For a software engineer, the process of changing a bit of code in such a way that it will behave in some useful way when it's running in a different environment (say, on different hardware) is 'porting' it.
<autobiographical_note>
My one remaining item of logo-wear from my days serving the god of small things[imicro-chips] is a tee-shirt referring (or seeming to refer) to the wearer as a 'VIP'. This dates from the heady days when OpenVMS (DEC/Compaq/HP's operating system, a so-called 'workhorse' that used to run only on VAX hardware) was being rehashed so that it would run on the much more widely available (and therefore cheaper, not that the bean-counters considered anything of  the sortItanium® chip produced by  Intel®. The letters VIP stood for VAX-Itanium Port.
</autobiographical_note>

Update 2015.01.14.18:15 – Added this P4S:

P4S
It now seems to be working, to an extent – but it‘s too early  to give an unalloyed thumbs-up. Don‘t hold your brreath.

Update 2015.02.06.10:00 – Added embedded P5S:


Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.







Wednesday 7 January 2015

'Ah me' surplus...

... a gag that isn't original, but first saw the light nearly 50 years ago; and the one person who heard it  is sadly not around to complain about the repetition (not that she would have); RIP.

Operating system-wise, everything is fine. I am now a three-o/s user: Windows 7 on the PC, and two laptops – one Android and one Linux. In the fullness of time I shall be an Open Systems person.

But power-tool-wise things are neither hunky nor dory; and the villain of the piece is Wolf. I have been sold a pig in a poke.
<digression>
I should  have known; wolves and pigs are famous for their incompatibility.
But I'm the one who's doing the huffing and puffing.  
</digression>
The first warning was the one online review (among dozens of glowing ones) that warned about the power planer's cutter – for that is the power tool at issue – being skew-whiff (as was the replacement the maker sent).

But I ordered it anyway. Which is when the Ah-me surplus began mounting up. First of all, it had no User Guide enclosed. So I used my default medium:


To give Wolf their due, they responded promptly. I now have a PDF of what they call a manual and expect hardcopy in the post.

<rant>
As a reformed Technical Writer (well, retired actually –  although there‘s plenty of work out there, if only the makers of DIY stuff would WAKE UP) ...
<meta_rant>
and that's another thing: when you start a sentence 'As a ...' make the subject match up FFS.  A lot of hot air is wasted on the iniquity of the dangling participle. I try to avoid them, but they're often not crucial to a misreading. If someone says 'Walking across the playground the chemistry lab came into his view', that's a bit of a shame; but nobody in their right mind is going to envisage an ambulatory chemistry lab. But this 'As a...' issue matters. I just received mail from KDP about the New Deal VAT regulations. Naively, I thought it might clarify my tax liabilities. [Hollow laugh.]
 As a publisher with Kindle Direct Publishing, the European Union (EU) tax laws have changed regarding the taxation of digital products (including eBooks).
I wanted to know if I or Amazon was the publisher of  my stuff in the eyes of the EU. But could I hope for enlightenment from this  belated [it arrived the day after  the changes came into effect]  advisory? Could I bu@@ery?!  Do they not pay people to write this stuff?
</meta_rant>
...I am pained by standards of technical writing. My experience was mostly in the field of software, and mostly for System Managers rather than end users  – real-life punters, that is – but many of the issues are the same.

Lists, for example:
  • not too long (about 7 items, plus or minus 2 ideally). 
  • made up of items that are syntactically parallel
  • numbered if and only if there is a point to the numbering (for example, sequentiality); and if the sequence has more than 9 steps
    • Break it down into chunks.
    • Tell your manager – again  about writers needing to be involved in the design of the User Interface.
    )
There are exceptions of course. But this ‘Guide‘ (which should really be in Braille, for all the light it casts) breaks every guideline in the book. The items in some of its lists  – numbered or bulleted on what seems to be an entirely random basis – run well into double figures.

But regardless of its structure, its language is indescribable. Here are just three examples:
When  you are setting, installing or [sic, no comma] or putting the electrical tool down, make sure that you never touch the planing tool.
As it happens, after much thought, I have worked out what this means: 'the planing tool' at the end of the sentence is a component of 'the electrical tool'. But before I recognized the polysemy of 'tool' (its having more than one referent) I was potentially immobilized by the instruction to adjust the thing without touching it. It was like a parlour trick: 'Can you get the <thing-one>  into the <thing-two> without <apparently-necessary-action>?'
Check the machine, loose part [sic] and accessories for damage incurred during transportation.
This was in the 'Guide', so I couldn't of course, check before my tweet, but helpfully it (the 'set of operating instructions') included  the words 'set of operating instructions'. Come to think of it, it would make sense if there were two documents: a User Manual and Guide and a 'set of operating instructions' – with one pointing to the other as something whose presence was to be checked. But I've spent long enough trying to make sense of what they sent me. Besides, any possible second document would presumably be no less indecipherable than the one I've got (in fact I now have two copies: the promised  hardcopy arrived [just a photocopy of the PDF – so ... no  chance of clearer graphics]).

And 'damage incurred' is a pretty ... challenging? collocation. This BNC search shows no instance of incur among the collocates. Of course, BNC is pretty small. I tried to expand the search to the less authoritative but almost infinitely bigger Google, but the search for 'incur damage' (tout sec [=Fr for 'just that', roughly]) automagically picks up the perfectly acceptable 'incur damages'.
Use the extraction equipment for sucking out the wood shavings! [sic: {obviously quite important}]
What this means is anyone's guess.


</rant>

I could go on (and on [and on...]), But lexicography awaits.

b
This oddly specific number is no accident – see Miller (1956) as an academic might say. The rest of us can pick the bones out of Simple Psychology's explanation of short-term memory.

PS My 'image of the year so far' – only 7 days in, I know, but still – is Kipling's 'grinning like a coal-scuttle', which I heard this morning in BBC Radio 4's Just So Science (which I heard with much more appreciation than on my first reading [in short trousers...
<autobiographical_note>
and I can be sure about the trousers, Best Beloved, because I first read the
Just So Stories when I was in the Cubs – for whom Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa et al (all with /ɑ:/ in the first syllable, IF you please, Walt) had special significance.
In fact, elements of the uniform referred to the Just So Stories; for example, the cap could be adorned with one or two stars, depending on satisfactory performance of various skills ...
  <digression>
 One of  those skills was Run with a message. I imagine the person who dreamed it up was thinking of  carrying messages on a battlefield. But the interpretation my Pack  used didn't involve running  at all (which suited me fine); a cub with a starless cap was given a message at the end of one meeting and  had to memorize it for the following week. To this day I can't hear the words 'St Malo' without completing  the fragment of travel brochure that they used: "charming walled city on the Emerald Coast of Brittany".  
</digression> 
– and the stars represented the opening eyes of a baby wolf cub. Being in the Cubs was an experience that I associate with cold knees...
<autobiographical_note>
] ...of the book).

Update 2015.01.07.16:00 – Added this note:

Brief Tale from the Word-Face

On my initial trawl through words that contain *al* I have reached a word whose inclusion in Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced learners  (that's the paperback rather than the online thing, but still...) raises an eyebrow; it is cytomegalovirus. Call me old-fashioned, limiting my students by unnecessarily low expectations, but I really don't expect a learner, however 'advanced', to need a specific definition of that sort of word. They may indeed come across it in what used to be called 'broadsheets' (before they all newspapers started trimming their sails) but they will by other elements of cultural education have learnt to break that daunting word down into  cyto- + megalo- + virus, (incidentally sorting out the stresses in that polysyllable), and supplying a specific dictionary entry just impedes that progress.



Update 2015.01.08.12:15 – Added this...

Conclusion

OK, the User Guide is rubbish; but that doesn't explain the whole problem. Bad documentation leads to bad practice. Given that the PDF was useless, I had to rely on the  tool itself. There was an image pointing to what seemed to be  a retaining nut. (On another tool I had, such a nut was a safety device: unless it was tightened, the motor wouldn't run. So I assumed that it was necessary to be in control of this nut-like thing.)

The image had two extremities; one was a spanner, the other was a finger pointing. I interpreted this – as did MrsK – as meaning ‘Use a spanner to undo this‘.  And the list of parts included the word wrench. If the User Guide itself had not been missing, I might have interpreted this image as meaning ‘Here is the spanner. Pull it out gently, using only your finger and thumb.‘

But I didn't. Assuming the promised wrench was missing too, I used a spanner, and tried to turn it. This picture shows the result:




Which I hope explains my rant: my lips are sealed, though, expletive-wise. [But really, they might as well ship these things  pre-broken  – it'd save a lot of bother.] 

Update 2015.01.09.14:10 – Added this note:

The actual words – in an apparently numbered list, which has  nothing but the number '1' 5 times – are 'tightening wrench', which suggests the question 'Is there another sort?'

Update 2015.01.10.15:00 – Added digression in blue.

Update 2015.01.22.23:15 – Added clarifications in maroon.

Update 2015.06.15.11:15 – Added wolf cub (that's what they were called then) picture

Update 2018.04.15.18:30 – Fixed a typo or two, and reworded (after I‘d worked out what I meant). I still think the  word sequence was OK in those instructions for writing lists, but sequentiality makes it easier to parse the parenthesis.


Friday 2 January 2015

Firssst falterring foottstepps

Just to prove I can – up to a point – here‘s my first effort at Harmless Droidery.   And I take as my starting point a bit of silent editing on the part of the Beeb...
<rantette intensity="The heat of a million Suns" point="none, the battle‘s lost">
NOT, gaawd help us, on behalf of the Beeb – WOW (Why oh why) do people find the two so easy to confuse?
</rantette>
When the railway fares went up again today, with the inexorability of <inexorable-thing> this morning, some spoke (that‘s my home-grown PC version of ‘spokesman‘, on the not entirely solid analogy of chair) said that ‘any price rise was to be erm ... regrettable, but <blah-blah-blah>‘

<digression>
The notion that English people abroad speaking to foreign people just speak English more slowly and loudly seems to  me analogous to these spokes too. And it‘s a pleasing coincidence that one of the Spanish words for such a person – portavoz – means ‘megaphone‘.
</digression>
In the midday replay of this clip the Beeb‘s engineers had saved a millisecond or two by repairing the anacoluthon (that‘s a grown-up word for ‘whoops, you can edit that can‘t you?‘, or – to use the word favoured by David Crystal blend – (when the syntactic engine jumps the points‘, as it were).  They deleted the ‘to be erm..‘ and left the ‘any price rise was regrettable‘. I doubt if iPlayer will have preserved the evidence; I  guess the spliced version is THE TRUTH from now on.

Finally, I hope to do some Bluetoothery. Gimme a sec... Nope, phone‘s charging. So I‘ll improve the shining hour by showing off the  camera app, not to  mention the very cool slip-case Daughter Christmas gave me:


Now about that Bluetooth thing, my phone couldn‘t hack it. It‘s paired  OK, but it needs thpaathe [that's /θpeɪθ/]. I could  probably fix it by  deleting some stuff, but  life‘s too  short. So, with the deepest of apologies for the Close Quotes (which I suppose are a feature of this mobile stuff – Mobility justifies barbarity; discuss) I‘ll sign off.

b
Update 2015.01.04.17:00  – Added IPA bit in red [I haven't yet learnt to hack this sort of thing in Android.]



Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 



And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this

Freebies (Teaching resources:  
nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with over 2,400 views and nearly 1,000 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.