Every piece of graded work in the course, what it is worth, and when it is due.
Four pieces of work. One runs every week, one checks your language systems midway through the course, one is an essay with no conlang content, and one is the finished language.
What it adds up to
- Phonology and Grammar Portfolio15%set week 6 · due 2 April 2027, end of week 6
- What Arrival Gets Wrong30%set week 9 · due 30 April 2027, end of week 10
- Weekly Build Log15%set week 2 · due 7 May 2027, end of week 11
- The Language40%set week 12 · due 21 May 2027, after week 12
100% of the course, and no exam.
The four do not run one after another. The Build Log runs alongside the other three from week 2 to week 11, which is why two hundred words a week is worth fifteen per cent. The two weeks you spend on the essay are the only part of the course that asks for no work on your own language.
The four briefs#
Weekly Build Log
One short entry a week — the film you watched, the subsystem you added, and what the film changed about the decision you made
Due 7 May 2027 · Weight: 15%
Phonology and Grammar Portfolio
Your language systems rather than its vocabulary — inventory, phonotactics, morphology and syntax, written so that somebody else could build from them
Due 2 April 2027 · Weight: 15%
What Arrival Gets Wrong
An essay on the film's claim about language and thought, what the research actually shows, and how the two differ
Due 30 April 2027 · Weight: 30%
The Language
The finished language — description, lexicon, script and a glossed text — plus the crit, where you read it aloud and somebody else reads a sentence back
Due 21 May 2027 · Weight: 40%