Timeline for Pretentious writing tag
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:55 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://ell.stackexchange.com/ with https://ell.stackexchange.com/
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| Feb 12, 2015 at 4:05 | comment | added | levininja | This answer is so long that I think it qualifies for the tag. | |
| Feb 11, 2015 at 22:03 | comment | added | ColleenV | I agree that looking over the tags is a great way to generate a catalog of information for the topic, and I think that tagging things appropriately is a very important activity for reviewers. I just wonder when I click on the "pretentious writing" tag whether that accumulation of questions will be particularly useful. I often use tags to run down potentially related questions, so even if you don't put them in the search box, they're still essentially a search tool. It's difficult to imagine wanting to search for or follow "pretentious writing". | |
| Feb 11, 2015 at 21:57 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | @ColleenV …Just by looking at the list of tags, you learn something important about the overall topic (not something you can put into words, though). And then I saw that answerers often tag a question with some insight that the questioner couldn't possibly have before asking: "Your question is actually about subject-verb agreement." My current thinking is that tags serve a function like words or file folders: they embody a conceptualization of the topic. There's no way to exhaustively list all the uses of that. A rough way to say the purpose would be: to mark important question categories. | |
| Feb 11, 2015 at 21:55 | comment | added | Ben Kovitz | @ColleenV I wondered the same thing myself for a long time. At first, I thought tags were just to help questioners search for answers. Then I discovered (on stackoverflow.com) that people subscribe to a tag because they like answering questions about a specific topic, or to learn about it. On ELL, I found myself using tags just to see what people had asked about a topic. If you want to see how EFL learners struggle with the present-perfect, looking over questions with that tag is great way to do it. Eventually, it dawned on me that the tags themselves are a kind of accumulated wisdom.… | |
| Feb 11, 2015 at 19:17 | comment | added | ColleenV | I'm not objecting to anything in your answer, but it made me wonder "What is the purpose of a tag on ELL?" Is it merely to categorize questions, or is its purpose to help folks looking for an answer to narrow their search? If learners are unable to easily identify "pretentious writing", does the tag help them find answers to their question? Will a learner ever initially tag their question with it, or will it only be reviewers that tag it after the fact to categorize the question? | |
| Feb 11, 2015 at 15:47 | history | answered | Ben Kovitz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |