How To Write a Daily Language Observation

Every day Linguistics students are expected to be keen observers of language, making notes about the interesting things they hear.  From time to time, students need to write up a more formal language observation.  They need to describe the context of the situation where they observed something interesting, they must explain in detail exactly what they heard, they must create a hypothesis about why the interesting thing was said in the way it was, and finally they must figure out a way that they could potentially test or do research to determine if their hypothesis was correct.  Recent topics that students have written about include the use of the words "finna" and "yous," as well as a list of the most recent slang being spoken in New York City from a student who visited recently.