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Human beings are, mostly, very good at reporting the content of what they have heard or read; but they are far from competent at reporting any talk verbatim. In any conversation, if you stop the person who is speaking and then ask them to repeat exactly what they were just saying, you will see that this is a far from easy task. Alternatively, ask the listener to repeat verbatim what they have just heard. When somebody puts away a book claiming that they have read it thoroughly, ask them to tell you exactly what was said in the last paragraph or even the last sentence. They will find it very hard, if not plain impossible. The only way to know exactly what has just been said, and how it has been said, is to record the interaction. Human beings are also very bad at reporting

on their own use of language: each person thinks they know exactly how they use language but serious analysis will demonstrate that they are not as good as they think they are. For example, during an informal conversation in the pub one evening, one participant was heard to say ‘I hate it when people add “wise” on to the end of words like traffic-wise or climate-wise’ and was heard then to use that construction spontaneously several times in the ensuing discussion. Any serious commentary/report on language and its uses, whether that report is to be prescriptive or descriptive, has to be based on rigorous research methods and any research project in linguistics (as in any other academic area) will only be as good as its planning and

disadvantages to any research methodology but careful planning should eliminate many of the latter. To research and analyse language in use,

therefore, samples of language in use (whether written language or oral language) have to be collected and such samples are then used as data in a research project. Before any data are collected, however, the research area needs to be clearly defined and the research question(s) to be clearly stated, because only then can it be ensured that any data collected will be relevant and useful. Where there is a problem in defining a linguistic area to research, Wray and Bloomer (2006) offer some helpful suggestions.