I've spent the past week or so writing a few hundred thousand words in an attempt to come up with about 3,000 that I actually like all the while trying to analyse something that I wrote from a viewer's perspective.

It's not easy, but talking to a couple of people yesterday I was shocked to discover that the approach I take to writing essays is somewhat like a programming.

To a certain extent, having written this essay I am now almost certain that English could be referred to as an object-orientated programming code for humans.

The first part of each essay is a title. Programs have those. A bit like what you see in the title bar, I guess.

The second part of an essay is where you start doing your review of all the theories other people have put forward that you might like to discuss in this essay. You 'define' them.

What do you do in programming? That's right, declare your variables.

$myth = 'text'
write 'a part of metonomy' (I won't bore you with the details of this; this blog post is verging on the insane anyway)

After declaring them, you're then free to use them in the essay in any way you want - as many times as you want. Provided it's sort of relevant.

Then you get on to what your essay is actually doing - its main purpose in life is something. In this case, I'd probably have typed something along the lines of this:



At the end of this process, you've got an essay. Normally, of course, you'd need a conclusion but since we are mainly dealing with Media Studies at the moment then this isn't necessary at all.

I think the fact that my brain is coming up with things like this blog post actually demonstrates that I'm going completely and utterly insane and possibly might need to be placed in a padded room pretty soon.

As you were though, my next challenge is to talk about Child Language Acquisition and how kids really do need some input before they reach adulthood, in order to learn language.