The maximWyrd oft nereð // unfӕgne eorl, / þonne his ellen deah“Fate often spares an undoomed man when his courage avails” (Beowulf572b-573) has been likened to “Fortune favors the brave,” with little attention to the wordunfӕgne, which is often translated “undoomed”. This comparison between proverbs emphasizes personal agency and suggests a contrast between the proverb in 572b-573 and the maximGӕð a wyrd swa hio scel“Goes always fate as it must” (Beowulf455b), which depicts an inexorablewyrd. This paper presents the history of this view and argues that linguistic analysis and further attention to Germanic cognates of(un)fӕgereveal a proverb that harmonizes with 455b.(Un)fӕgeand its cognates have meanings related to being brave or cowardly, blessed or accursed,anddoomed or undoomed. A similar Old Norse proverb also speaks to the significance of the status ofunfӕgemen. Furthermore, the prenominal position ofunfӕgneis argued to represent a characterizing property of the man. The wordunfӕgneis essential to the meaning of this proverb as it indicates not the simple absence of being doomed but the presence of a more complex quality. This interpretive point is significant in that it provides more information about the portrayal ofwyrdinBeowulfby clarifying a well-known proverb in the text; it also has implications for future translations of these verses.
While large-scale language and writing assessments benefit from a wealth of literature on the reliability and validity of specific tests and rating procedures, there is comparatively less literature that explores the specific language of second language writing rubrics. This paper provides an analysis of the language of performance descriptors for the public versions of the TOEFL and IELTS writing assessment rubrics, with a focus on linguistic agency encoded by agentive verbs and language of ability encoded by modal verbs can and cannot. While the IELTS rubrics feature more agentive verbs than the TOEFL rubrics, both pairs of rubrics feature uneven syntax across the band or score descriptors with either more agentive verbs for the highest scores, more nominalization for the lowest scores, or language of ability exclusively in the lowest scores. These patterns mirror similar patterns in the language of college-level classroom-based writing rubrics, but they differ from patterns seen in performance descriptors for some large-scale admissions tests. It is argued that the lack of syntactic congruity across performance descriptors in the IELTS and TOEFL rubrics may reflect a bias in how actual student performances at different levels are characterized.
This study explores how first-year multilingual writers in a classroom community make sense of their first university writing center visits. Employing narrative analysis of student journals, this study illustrates differences in themes writers discuss in their narratives of first writing center visits and themes in self-reflections on their writing. Comparing narratives in student journals and tutor report forms, this study also presents the congruities and discrepancies between writer and tutor views of a session. Writer emphasis on grammar when narrating writing center visits contrasts with writer emphasis on development in self-reflections on their writing. When tutor and writer session descriptions differ, tutors emphasize discussion of development and organization while writers emphasize sentence-level accuracy. Without scaffolding of strategies for writing center use, first-year multilingual writers may privilege sentence-level feedback in their early understanding of the writing center, resulting in a more limited experience of writing center support.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.