W 001 F

Introduction

I have difficulties when I have to write essays for my classes. Using the punctuation marks and works cited correctly always makes me think for hours. To eliminate these problems I had the chance to attend courses to improve my academic skills of writing. These courses are started every semester in the English department of Janus Pannonius University (JPU). In the spring semester of 1998 the Writing and Research Skills courses, with Horváth József as the tutor, were announced at two different times under the code of ANG 1601.

To complete the course students had to write a portfolio, which consisted of at least nine essays. One of these essays was titled: My Dictionary. Another task was to write a research paper. The tutor gave ten topics, and the students had to choose one.

In this paper I intend to examine the introductions of the My Dictionary essays concerning the tips and training process of the tutor, taught to the students during the semester. I also want to find out how others approached the theme, whether they got right into the middle of it or not.

Method

I asked seven students to share their essays with me. Including mine, eight students participated in the survey and all of them attended the Writing and Research Skills courses in the spring semester of 1998. (I will refer to students who took part in the survey as Student A, Student B, Student C, Student D, Student E, Student F, Student G and Student H to avoid any partiality or influence during the analysis.)

I read the introductions of the essays four times to gain valid data to accomplish my purpose: to present a precise content analysis. I categorised them according to eleven aspects: the number of be forms the number of passive forms the number of words the number of sentences comments of the tutor how many times the word dictionary appeared first word last word mistakes marked by the tutor and other students. (The tutor used and symbols to show his opinion about students’ writings.)

After examining all the introductions, I compared them to see whether they had any similarities to draw conclusions from or not. My personal opinion did not influence the results of the research, which was crucial if I wanted to remain objective about the texts investigated. I carried out the task I had set without modification, accepting the results as they occurred.
As for introductions I only took the first paragraphs of the essays into consideration.

Results and Discussion

After reading the introductions I filled out Table 1 that shows the main features of the introductions examined.

Table 1 results of the aspects examined

1 The students did not show these essays to the tutor, so he could not give his opinion about them.
I dedicated special attention to the numbers and words written in blue when I analysed the data I got because these formed the bases of my comparison.
Be forms and real verbs
During the course the tutor asked the students to avoid overusing the be forms and use real verbs instead. In an average of eight verbs per introductions students used be forms three times. Although Student A used the most verbs, 12, Student F produced the biggest variety of verbs like: possess, suggest, buy, tell, be obsessed with, use, look up, face and make. Student H used the most be forms: was three times and wasn’t twice.

Passive forms
Students took Zinsser’s advice to use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb (110). The passive form only appeared three times when the students could not avoid applying it. Student D wrote I was amazed..., Student F wrote I wasn’t really obsessed with it... and Student G wrote It was ...published in 1990 by ... .

Tutor’s remarks
The tutor used and symbols to express his opinion either in the positive () or in the negative () way. I found that, among the papers he read, he used the symbol only once. Story opening... (Student H). He did not use the symbol at all.

The tutor put his comments and corrections down in three ways. At the beginning of the course he asked students to leave a wider margin so he could write his notes there. He also used stick-on notes which he stuck on the writings. Last, he corrected the grammatical and lexical mistakes students made.

The tutor commented only two essays. In Student D’s introduction he wrote the following comment: Multiple choice exercise? because the student could not decide whether to use the word have or had and he wrote have/had. Another time the tutor said: Story opening but why were you so desperate? Tell me more about it (Student H).

Students made four punctuation mark errors and five grammatical errors. The tutor deleted words twice by putting ... symbols around words which he found unnecessary.

Length of introductions
Students separated the introductions clearly from the rest of the essays. The number of sentences varied between one and four, and the number of words changed between 15 (Student A) and 77 (Student B) per introductions. This means an average of three sentences and 53 words per introductions.

The usage of words
I faced a surprising fact when I compared the first and last words of the introductions. Five students started their essays with the word I, which gave a personal voice to the script. For example, Student D said that he was 17 when he received his first monolingual dictionary as a birthday present. Student H wrote that she was desperate to buy a dictionary, and she bought one in Széchenyi square. The others started their work in a much more general way.

The last word students used the most times was dictionary. Student A and D arrived at describing the type or name of their favourite dictionaries.

The word dictionary appeared 15 times. Student A wrote it four times, but this number seemed too many comparing to the length of the introduction. The word appeared in each sentence. Student H did not include it at all rather, she replaced dictionary with it.

Conclusion
When I started this project I did not have any special expectation as for the outcome of the survey. The tutor gave the title to the students, and they approached the theme creatively, applying what they had learnt. They used different methods to lead the readers to the field. Analysing the first words of the essays I saw that students introduced the topic either in a personal or in a more general way. They only committed minor errors, and they did not have any difficulties in writing these texts.

I chose to analyse introductions because they are essential parts of every composition. These call the readers’ attention and establish the spirit of the whole essay. Students have to attend the Writing and Research Skills courses to master the tricks of writing introductions and become experts.