Content

Introduction

All documents are classified as belonging to one of the following genres, and we have tried where possible to include an equal number of words in all genres:

• Administrative prose (such as legal documents or council minutes)
• Expository prose (such as travel narratives)
• Personal writing (such as diaries and personal letters)
• Instructional prose (such as textbooks and educational materials)
• Religious prose (including sermons)
• Verse and drama
• Imaginative prose (such as novels and short stories)
• Journalism

This is in addition to the subcorpus of language commentators, which consists of approximately 1 million words. There is a comprehensive list of all documents available for browsing.

While CMSW has been assembled with the aim of being used as a complete corpus for researchers, there are individual documents and collections of documents which might be of interest to those wishing a narrower focus. These include:

• Travel narratives from the Mitchell Library, including Thomas Crawford’s 1825 journey to Australia, J. Stewart’s 18th-century account of Tibet, and a young soldier’s letters home to Glasgow from Fort Oswego in 1755.
• The first edition of Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
• Material from Glasgow University’s Archives, including documents related to student disciplinary trials from the 18th century