Win a Google Nexus 7!

Today we're pleased to be launching a competition that gives you the chance to win the Nexus 7 tablet - Google's fantastic answer to the iPad. On the Nexus 7, the Crossref-it.info mobile website is a joy to use, and of course you have access to thousands upon thousands of apps.

Usually, the Nexus 7 would set you back £159 + postage, but by taking part in this little competition it can be yours for free.

How to take part

Taking part is easy, simple and quick. All you need to do is click the link at the bottom of this page to take part in a short survey we are doing of our users. The survey is very short and its aim is to help us understand you, the Crossref-it.info community, better. This will help us improve the site.

So, if you want to help us improve Crossref-it.info, have a short moment to spare, and want to win a Nexus 7, what are you waiting for?

Please note: we are only able to ship the Nexus 7 to a UK address, but international users are still welcome to give us their views in the survey! By clicking the link to the survey, you accept the terms and conditions outlined below.

Take part in the survey and win a Nexus 7!

Terms and Conditions

Please read these competition rules carefully. If you enter this competition, we will assume that you have read these rules and that you agree to them. 

• To enter the competition you must be a UK resident. This competition is for UK users of Crossref-it.info
• This competition is not open to employees (or members of their immediate families) of Crossref-it.info
• No purchase necessary.
• Only one entry per person
• No responsibility can be accepted for entries that are lost or delayed, or which are not received for any reason.
• The winner will be randomly selected from the entrants.
• Crossref-it.info reserves the right to amend the competition end date at any time.
• If you win the competition, we will notify you by e-mail.
• You can find out who has won the competition by sending an email to info@crossref-it.info.
• By entering the competition the winner agrees to participate in such promotional activity and material as Crossref-it.info may require.
• No part of the prize is exchangeable for cash or any other prize.
• Incorrectly completed entries will be disqualified.
• This competition is being run by Crossref-it.info.
• Please read our Privacy Policy which tells you how we use any personal information we may collect about you by entering a competition.
• Crossref-it.info reserves the right to amend these rules at any time. If we do this we will publish the amended competition rules and/or specific competition rules on the relevant competition page.
• Crossref-it.info will endeavour to send prizes within a month of the competition end date.
• To enter the competition you must be 18 years old or over at the time of entry.

A text for the weather!

As snow still lingers across Britain into April, it only seems appropriate that the next revision study plan from Crossref-it.info is on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale! This text strikes balance between cold / decay and the restoration / hope of spring and summer to come. Bring it on!

Help at hand

The app covers all sorts of areas:

> Easy multiple choice questions so that you can be confident you’re familiar with the play

The revision app tells you how you’ve done and gives you the chance to try again if you get something wrong, pointing you in the right direction to find the correct answer.


> Directed note-making on important aspects of each scene

It’s like having your own personal teacher, shining a light onto the key points you need to think about.


> Useful essay questions on character, narrative and theme, with examples of how you might answer

From this point of the academic year onwards, you need to gather together all the strands of what you’ve learnt and weave them into coherent arguments. The app shows you how (and for more advice about essay and exam writing, check out the ‘How to..’ section at Crossref-it.info).

Access point

First install the free Crossref-it.info English Literature app from the Chrome Webstore using the Google Chrome browser. Once you’ve signed in, for just 79p you can get guided revision help on The Winter’s Tale. And don’t forget those all-important bronze, silver and golden quills waiting to be added to your account. How far will you go?

Fancy a Nexus 7?

Next week visitors to Crossref-it.info will have the chance to win Google’s fantastic answer to the iPad (which would otherwise set you back by £159) by answering 10 quick and easy questions about the site. Your feedback will help Crossref-it.info keep improving.

So keep your eyes open and put in a bid for the prize!

Are you a poet?

It may be a cliché, but typically many teenagers privately try and condense the strong emotions they experience into a concise form of meaningful words – a poem.

What they write may not rhyme or have a clear beat, but it qualifies as a poem, particularly if it’s something which has been shaped and modified in order to most aptly convey or make sense of the situations that have impacted them.

Why do we do this?

Poems and/or song lyrics have a way of summing up an experience, of making it count. The thrill of attraction, the powerful crush of isolation, the anger and confusion when a family splits up, the wing-beat desire to escape our circumstances – in situations like these which threaten to overwhelm us, writing a poem enables us to find a voice. Very often we never share what we have created but it serves as a marker of what we have come through.

Shared experience

Of course, if we do ever pluck up the courage to let others see what we’ve written, we usually discover that they can relate to it. Our voice may be unique, but our humanity is shared. Last week’s World Poetry Day (21.3.13) highlighted this very idea.

According to the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova:

‘Poetry is one of the purest expressions of linguistic freedom. … poetry is a journey – not in a
dream world, but often close to individual emotions, aspirations and hopes.’
But Bokova stresses that poems go beyond individual experiences:
‘Poetry is a component of the identity of peoples .. [it] gives form to their dreams and
expresses their spirituality in the strongest terms - it emboldens all of us also to change the
world.’

Poetry at A Level

When we study poems written through the centuries, what we encounter are voices declaring what
the writers feel are vital messages, poets reaching out to connect to their original audience and
subsequently to us:

• Wordsworth wants us to experience the sublime
• Herbert wants us to encounter God
• Blake wants us share his protest over hypocrisy
• Hopkins wants us to understand both ecstasy and the Dark Night of the Soul.

Each are seeking some way to renew their culture and ‘change the world.’

Although some references are now opaque to us (which is what Crossref-it.info tries to address), their human voice is as immediate and important as the contemporary experience we pour into our own poems.

Add your voice

Last week’s message was that the ‘power of poetry is transmitted from generation to generation, in the hallowed texts of great authors and in the works of anonymous poets.’ Poetry is ‘a source of linguistic wealth and dialogue’ that ‘embodies the creative energy of culture, for it can be continuously renewed.’

So let’s add our voice to that stream of powerful expression. Let’s keep – or start – writing!

Studying Frankenstein?

Crossref-it.info has released another reading plan to help you get thoroughly up to speed with Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Where to go

You’ll need to access the Crossref-it.info Google Chrome app. To do this, you must first install the Crossref-it.info English Literature app from the Chrome Webstore using the Google Chrome browser. Once you’ve signed in, you can do any or all of the following, earning virtual rewards as you go:

• Test yourself on what happens in each chapter with easy multiple choice questions
  For example, in Vol. 1 ch. 3, what does Frankenstein study in order to understand the cause of life?
  Is it:
  • a) How bodies decay
  • b) Electricity
  • c) Childbirth or
  • d) Gaseous exchange
    
    You can find out if you got the right answer below, but, even if you don’t get everything accurate first time, the revision app tells you how you’ve done and gives you the chance to try again, also pointing you in the right direction to get the correct answer.

• Go up a level and investigate what connections you can make to the novel
  • Of course it is how you interact with Shelley’s novel which really demonstrates your skill as a student. But where do you start when you need to make your own notes? The investigative questions at this level will help you focus on what is important, so that when you look back at your answers you’ll have a really helpful summary for revision.

• Pull what you know together by working through thought-provoking essay questions, then check how well you do against a professional answer.
  The Frankenstein revision and reading plan tests how well you can make use of your knowledge on three key areas:
  
  • The impact of the novel’s original social and political context
  • Mary Shelley’s use of analogies between Satan, Adam and Prometheus and characters in the story
  • The characterisation of - and relationship between - the novel’s framing narrators
    
    Perhaps you need help with one of these areas right now!

You can do it!

Working through the Crossref-it.info Frankenstein reading plan might well seem a challenge, but there’s also lots of help on hand – and all for just the cost of an average iTune (79p). Why not see how well you do?

And by the way, well done to anyone who realised that the correct answer to the first question was

a) How bodies decay!

Studying English at Uni

Surfing the net recently I came across a fantastic resource from Leeds University - www.theenglishfaculty.org. Created by the English Faculty there, it aims to bridge the gap between Advanced and Degree level English.

If you are studying particular texts, check out the podcasts which use the skills of lecturers on BA courses to address A Level issues and analysis.

The following supplement the Crossref-it.info guides on Frankenstein and Great Expectations, but there are many more:

• http://www.theenglishfaculty.org/a-levels/item/275-frankenstein-in-context-pt1
• http://www.theenglishfaculty.org/a-levels/item/306-are-traditional-texts-always-what-they-seem?-great-expectations-pt21
• http://www.theenglishfaculty.org/a-levels/item/303-are-traditional-texts-always-what-they-seem?-great-expectations-pt22

If you are studying Language, there are podcasts on linguistics and grammar. There is also a wealth on info about the skills required for literary and language analysis.

For those of you hoping for a place at uni to study English, it’s also worth checking out the advice about what’s expected in a BA course and how to make the transition from school to college.

Meanwhile, we hope the contextual info at Crossref-it.info will help you get those grades...

It's arrived!

Not only has the New Year arrived, but also the latest initiative to help you develop your chances of success at English A Level! Last term this blog flagged up an opportunity to help you improve your knowledge of the texts you will be examined on at AS/A2 Level (perhaps you are doing mocks right now). Now you can see it for yourself.

Learning to drive through literature

Just as there are CDs and apps you can buy to help you get to grips with the driving theory test, so Crossref-it.info has produced some English Literature revision apps to help you drive confidently through the intricacies and implications of six key exam texts. Each month will bring another text app on road until coverage equals that of the regular Crossref-it.info.

You’ll need to access the site via the Google Chrome browser. For the cost of an i-tune (just 79p) you can:

• Test yourself on what happens in each scene or chapter
• Go up a level and investigate what connections you can make to the work you are studying
• Pull it all together at the third level by working through thought-provoking essay questions, then checking how well you did against a professional answer.

Brain jam

Everyone has moments when they feel like they’re getting nowhere quickly. When giving up just feels like the easier option. We’ve been there and know that encouragement can make all the difference.

So, as you work through each level (only as many as you wish), your personal account will keep track of your progress and show you how just how successful you’ve been. What’s more, at each stage there are virtual rewards to win. If you are the competitive type then you might even want to compare your achievements with those of your mates. Which of you might be the first to hit gold?

Thorough knowledge = success

Ultimately the goal is academic success and, just like a driving test, thorough knowledge is key. Every examiners’ report stresses the importance of knowing every part of the text. The new Crossref-it.info study apps are just giving you a better chance…

A carol for Christmas

’Tis the season to be jolly…

Around much of the world people are gearing up to celebrate Christmas on December 25th. Traditionally a time of feasting and present giving, it is also a time for communicating – conveying our affection for friends and family via cards and proclaiming the narrative behind the celebration through carols. Hark the Herald Angels Sing and O Come All ye Faithful are just two well-known examples of a story which has inspired creators of songs, poems and stories for centuries.

The accounts of Christmas carols focus on the Christian belief that a baby born two millennia ago, to a teenage girl who had never had sexual intercourse, was actually God himself entering human life, as had long been promised through the Jewish scriptures. Thirty-three years later, the now grown baby boy was falsely imprisoned and killed, taking on his shoulders the weight of all human wrong-doing.

A costly gift

Many carols inhabit the uneasy space between the awe inspired by the birth of Jesus, believed by Christians to be the Son of God, and the world’s rejection of him later. Like all Christmas literature, they are full of iconography and allusions to the biblical texts (and later traditions) which inspired them. Yet today, much of that iconography is unfamiliar to us.

For example, here is the first verse of a carol written in the last twenty years by Thomas Hewitt Jones and Timothy Dudley Smith. But what exactly does it mean?

‘CHILD OF THE STABLE'S SECRET BIRTH,
According to Luke 2:7, Jesus was born in a stable where the animals would have been kept, because an influx of travellers to Bethlehem meant that there was no other accommodation available. His family was poor and his birth unheralded by any people of worldly importance (hence ‘secret’).

THE LORD BY RIGHT OF THE LORDS OF EARTH,

The poverty and humble circumstances of his birth is contrasted with the Christian belief that Jesus’ prior status had been as co-ruler of heaven, to whom all earthly powers were subject, something Paul writes about in Philippians 2:6-7.

LET ANGELS SING OF A KING NEW-BORN,

In Luke 2:10-14 shepherds witness divine messengers who proclaim that the Christ (a term for the Annointed One of God) has arrived, and is to be regarded as Lord.

THE WORLD IS WEAVING A CROWN OF THORN:

Yet the advent of God on earth is not understood by most, according to John 1:10. Despite being a heavenly king, the only recorded crown Jesus wore on earth was the one made as a contemptuous jibe by Roman soldiers prior to his execution Matthew 27:28-9.

A CROWN OF THORN FOR THAT INFANT HEAD

Again the carol contrasts the brutal fate awaiting the adult Jesus with his innocent beginnings. We associate babies with vulnerability, with downy hair and soft skin, to be protected from – rather than exposed to – harsh treatment.

CRADLED SOFT IN THE MANGER BED.’

That Jesus’ first bed was merely the trough from which animals ate is mentioned three times in the original account (Luke 2:7-16). The carol’s first verse thus emphasises the belief that the ‘highest of the high’ arrived on earth as ‘the lowest of the low’. Yet the little baby is ‘cradled’ softly within the straw, perhaps indicating that the natural world recognised and protected him even if the human one ultimately did not (a tradition that was fleshed out in medieval times and is alluded to in Hardy’s Christmas poem The Oxen).

There’s so much in it!

Only six short lines but all that background, which of course the carol composers assume their audience understand! That’s why www.crossref-it.info exists, to give you a quick way of accessing the writer’s intentions and the context of reception which any study of literature demands.

But meanwhile, don’t lose sight of the beauty of the text. There are four other verses to this carol, which also has a haunting melody. For a taste of the original, go to http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780193367449.do and click on the mp3 clip under ‘Resources’.

And of course, here’s hoping you have a HAPPY CHRISTMAS!