Tuesday, May 8, 2007

W 017 F

A well-done introduction is the brain of a text. Here you store everything in short that is important for the topic you will write about. It is the source from where every information of the discussion - every 'action of the body' - is controlled. The reader can predict from a well done introduction what he or she will find in the text. Just like the doctor, who can tell the difference between a sound and an ill man's abilities, behaviour if he or she knows what is the difference between the working of their brain. (What is the problem with the ill man s brain.) But not all introductions can fulfill this function.

HUSSE Papers 1997 was published after the third conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English, which was organized by JPU at Szeged in 1995. The book is a collection of papers written by the speakers of that conference. The fourty four papers are grooped into eight parts: five on literature, one on history and culture, one on linguistics and one on curriculum and testing. This provides the opportunity to see several types of introductions, that is several methods that the authors apply to call the attention of their reader.

My aim in this research paper is to show that there is correlation between the type of introduction and the theme it introduces. As a result, there is one or two characteristic introduction types of every section , of every field of discipline, that the sections are
about.
When one creates an ill done introduction, sometimes the problem is the length or the proportion of the length and the number of the paragraphs. So my second aim was to examine the introductions in this respect. When I had read the introductions I found that there is no point in considering this viewpoint according to sections. So here my examination here covered the whole volume.

METHOD

My first work was to read all the introductions in the book. Then I tried to find types according to the authors' method. My third step was to give labels to these type groops. I did not use written sources neither for grooping nor for labelling. The ideas were inspired by the "raw material" itself and I used my Writing and Research Skills course notes.

These labels are very short, one or two worded. Their function is not to explain, they are only "calling signals", the explanation and the examples (quotations) come after them.

When I had these labels I could examine the sections one by one statistically to find if my hypothesis about that correlation is true or not.

DISCUSSION

These papers were probably written by educated men, experts in their field. They had very likely to written a dozen of studies or essays. This practical experience may be the cause of the fact that I found very few not-leading-to-anywhere introductions, ones that talk about something different from the topic specified in the title and written in the body of the text.

It is minimal requirement in an introduction (and in a text) to have logical link along itself. So one can't regard a paper as a good work if it has this linkage, it's not enough to be considered good.

I want to show in a table what were the specific means in the introductions, what types I found. But before that I give the definition of these types under the label they got.

1.) DATA: The author uses exact data, for example personal names, names of places, dates.
"In 1973 the Black 'womanist' writer and critic, Alice Walker, placed a tombstone in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Zora Neale Hurston had been buried in an unmarked grave in 1960" (Miklódy, 1997, p. 183).

2.) QUOTATION:
A.) AT ONCE: The author uses a quotation just at the beginning of his introduction.
B.) INSIDE: The author uses a quotation inside the text of the introduction.
C.) WORK/WRITER ANALYZED: The quotation is from the work or from the person that the author is dealing with in the essay.
" well, my widow looked out on the Squero where Ogni Santi meets San Trovaso Things have ends and begginings (c76/476:4-7)
This is the first time the statement quoted in the title occurs in Pound's The Cantos" ( Novák , 1997, p. 25).

D .) ELSE: This type is in contrast with the one before: “C.) WORK/WRITER ANALYZED". That is why I gave it only this short label. Here the quotation is from another author, from another piece of work.

"I shall start with a quotation from a very unlikely source, here is the first sentence of the English short story writer and essayist V. C. Pritchett's autobiography : 'In my family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth' (5) " (Bényei, 1997, p. 72).
E.) REFERENCE: The author refers to someone else's findings. The duty of a reference like this is to raise the authenticity, the value of the text , or to make it a bit more grand-styled, sometimes bombastic. /Quotations are similar to references if we consider their role./

"In 1917 Sándor Fest devoted a few pages of his monography on the early Hungarian reception of English literature to Laurence Sterne's influence in Hungary (Fest 101-104). Fest recognized..." ( Hartvig, 1997, p. 65).

"Lakoff and Johnson, and many others after them, have provided overwhelming evidence for the view that metaphorical linguistic expressions cluster together to form larger categories that came to be called 'conceptual metaphors'..." (Kövecses, 1997, p. 323).

3.) CONCISE: These introductions compromise only data, facts about the paper itself: what the author examines and how, in what order he or she does this. My next quotation is not from an introduction, it is an introduction in full.

"This paper will look at the outcomes of the first year of our in-service cultural and methodological awareness-raising programme. This teacher developement project was designed for three years and involves three different groups of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) . First, the objectives and the recruitments of the participiants will be described. Second, the two-week course in England will be detailed. Third, follow-up activities will be discussed and the first year's achievement will be evaluated." (Bors, Nikolov, 1997, p. 368)

4.) EXAMPLE: The author starts immediately with an example, and settles his or her topic and purposes based on this example.
" In the Usage Note on the word help in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 3rd edition, we find the note: He helped me (to) pass my exam (=I passed). (...) so that it would sound contradictory to say, He helped me pass my exam, but I didn't. In other words, the English word help does not simply refer to the prosess of helping someone, it also implies that the goal to which the process is directed is sucessfully reached. The Japanes verb semantically corresponding to the English verb help, however, behaves quite differently." (Ikegami, 1997, p. 288)

5.) DEFINITION: The author gives the definition of a keyword at the beginning. Here is a good, original example for this:
" Diversity is a buzzword in American universities is in part a legacy of the 1960s" (James, 1997, p. 355).

6.) KEY SENTENCE: The author in the very first sentence tells the most important information, the answers for what? , why?, how?.

"In this paper I am going to examine briefly the relationship of Virginia Woolf, critic and novelist, to American women writers" (Surányi, 1997, p. 177).

7.) COMPARISION: A simile, a comparision runs through the introduction instead of any other explanations. I found only one example for this type in the volume.
"Many believe that banking is all about money, interests and security (...) yet the bank this paper is about to describe is quite different from those in Wall Street (...) So much so that in the safe of this bank one would not find a single cent, rather a wide variety of test items" (Szabó, 1997, p. 373).

8.) CONTEXT: The author starts up the paper by setting a more distant point of view onto the topic.
" It seems that even in our death-of-the-author and birth-of-the-reader age the author cannot be wholly disregarded. W.W. Robson is surely right in pointing out that for most people the image of the author can influence what they read to the detriment of the work...
To say that the image of Lytton Strachey is a bad one would be an understatement" (Rawlinson, 1997, p. 54).

RESULTS

I. Distribution of the types of introduction in the sections.

1.) In the first five sections , which are about literature "data", "quotation" and "key sentence" were the most frequent. In essays about literature quotation is always very popular. The analyst quote from the text analyzed, from other works of art and sometimes from other analysts. The later analysts can quote also the writings of their "forefathers", and they may find other earlier works of art that can be connected to the same analyzed work. It is like a system with texts circulating inside.

2.) The authors of the history, politics and culture section prefered using 'key sentence' and 'data' methods. Showing data in essays like this is very logical. If one wants to talk about a historical period or persons, events of it, he or she have to tell exactly which period is this.

3.) The authors of the "Studies in Linguistics" an "Curriculum and Testing Revisited" sections prefered using 'example', 'data' and 'key sentence methods. These sciences are fields where can't do anything without exact examples. Usually one doesn't have to answer 'Who did what when and where ?' questions, as for example a historian has to do.

II. Length and paragraphs
The diagram shows the correlation between the length of the introductions and the number of paragraphs these are divided into.

We can see that the maximum values can be found on a straight line. It would show that most of the introductions are structured 'healthily': the longer they are the more paragraphs they have. But not as much paragraphs as they should have to have. The straight line connecting the numbers should have to be ' on the floor above': from the sign of 5-10 lines in 2 paragraphs to the sigh of 1 page in 5-6 paragraphs. The introduction would be more perspectiuous that way. In the form most of them are written now the readers get frightened just at the beginning and what is worse: they won't get a clear sight of what they would have to read about , and will probably decide not to read at all.

CONCLUSION

My first intention was to find different types of introduction in the fourty-four papers, and to give labels to these types . I created eight types, eight labels. Then I tried to find characteristic introduction type(s) to the papers with the same theme. It meant to find characteristic introduction type to all the eight sections, as the papers are grooped in the volume according to their topic.

The papers about literature prefered "data", "quotation" and "key sentence".

The authors in the history, politics and culture section used "key sentence" and "data" mostly. In the "Studies on Linguistics" and "Curriculum and Testing Revisited" sections I found mainly "example", "data" and key sentence".

My second viewpoint was the length of the paragraphs and the length-paragraph correlation. Here I found that most of the authors did not divide their introductions to as many paragraph as they should have.

The paragraphs makes the text clear, well arranged. The reader can understand easier what the author wants to talk about.

Can there be more important intention that an author has to have?

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