So just a little humor.
On Tuesday, during a library instruction session for my English 100 students, reference librarian April Cunningham introduced the concept of truncation as a strategy to generate more results in a database search.
She repeated the word several times and even encouraged students to “write this down” because they’re likely to forget once they get home.
At the end of our sessions, I had a follow-up in-class writing task. One of my questions was, “Write down three new strategies that you learned during today’s instruction.”
Most students mentioned truncation. However, nearly all of them called it “trunking.”
One student called it “tree trunking,” and another called it “chunkation.”
