I know a lot of care goes into organizing big national conferences, but they’re not for me. With 15 concurrent sessions going on, it’s hard to make good choices, and there is a lot of zig-zagging from session to session. The conference on prescriptivsm is quite the opposite. It’s a small conference, it takes place on a campus (not at a corporate hotel), and everybody gets to go to everyone else’s talk. There is time to socialize and to get to know people from other countries. This year, the conference took place at Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful old city in Southern France (also a study-abroad destination for students at UW-Madison). I presented joint work with Carly Rose McClennahan, a graduate student at the School of Education, from our interviews with language professionals on their take on language variation and change. I also had time to explore the city, taste the food, and take pictures of a lot of dogs. It was the kind of connection builder a conference should be.
