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In the article, “Words that Have Made History, or Modeling the Dynamics of Linguistic Changes,” the author discusses how language has changed over time. Regarding this, one of my classmates wrote that they “feel like taking random words to see changes in certain words or certain parts of the language may not be very effective .” I agree with this statement because the article didn’t do a very good job of making clear what exactly their steps were to determine how this language has changed. Like many of the other articles we have read, they don’t use language that would make it easy for readers to grasp exactly what their plan is. If the reader is unable to fully understand, then it is hard to believe what is being written about and find it effective. Along with this, the article itself says that there are many potential problems with how they could collect this data. For example, it says, “These methods, however, share a common drawback, namely their results are by no means stable. Also, no cross-validation can be considered a downside.” Later it reads, “any attempts at finding direct correlations between historical events and stylistic breaks are subject to human prejudices, and therefore might introduce substantial bias to the results.” While there is always some sort of error, the lack of a proper explanation doesn’t allow for the reader to understand how the person conducting the experiment accounted for them.