W 027 F

Introduction
The English department of Janus Pannonius University (JPU) announces and starts the Writing and Research Skills courses every semester to its students. These courses help them learn how to write essays for the classes they attend. The courses go on under the tutorial guidance of Horváth József.

For improving their writing skills, the students have to keep a portfolio, which is a collection of essays that students write throughout the semester, that includes both given and free choice topics. This semester Horváth named the miniature essay as one of the six topics of the given category.

By analysing the miniature essays of my survey’s participants I intended to gather information about the main characteristics that made the task so special.

Method
I analysed nine miniature essays. To complete this task I had asked five students -- Bacskay Katalin, Billege Virág, Hajdú Anett, Hatta Diána and Kamahari Yuki-- to share their miniature essays with me. They attended the Writing and Research Skills course under the code of ANG 1601 in the spring semester of 1998. At my request the tutor gave me one more essay whose author was Kárpáti Ildikó. Altogether, six students shared their scripts with me, of which four belonged to the same student, Bacskay Katalin. I focused on her Friday Night Rituals essays because in two of them the tutor appeared as editor and co-author, and I wanted to see if the co-operation changed the essays radically or not. Except for Kamahari all of the participants were attending JPU. Kamahari came from Japan as a guest student.

Writing the miniature essays students had to meet the requirements of the tutor who had asked them to describe a concrete sensual experience in a maximum of 100 words.

Students gave the following titles to their essays:

Bacskay Katalin: Total Rest (later referred to as Bacskay 1)
Bacskay Katalin: Friday Night Rituals - original version (later referred to as Bacskay 2a)
- edited version by Horváth József (later referred to as Bacskay 2b) - co-authored version with Horváth József (later referred to as Bacskay 2c)
Billege Virág: Pécs by Night
Hajdú Anett: Shocking Rays
Hatta Diána: My Favourite Object
Kamahari Yuki: Lovely Hungarian Breads
Kárpáti Ildikó: Spanish Scents
Analysing these scripts I looked into eight main features:
the sensual experience described
title-content relationship
the number of words
the number of sentences
the number of paragraphs
the number of passive forms
first word
last word

Results and discussion
To get a clear picture of the main features examined, I tabulated the data collected in Table 1.
Table 1 of the qualitative and the quantitative features examined

1 I couldn’t decide whether the essays described a sensual experience or not because the experience described in the essays did not belong to any of the five senses.
2 I counted the words including the titles.
Sensual experience described - the title-content relationship

A few times, just by reading the titles, I could guess what sensation the author would describe. Billege described the glitter of nightly Pécs. Hajdú described the feeling of touching rays. Kamahari told us about eating Hungarian bread. Kárpáti let us experience the smells of Spain. But in Bacskay’s essays I couldn’t guess what the essays would describe. In these cases I was also in trouble to define the nature of the sensation. In Hatta’s essay the title told me about the content, but it was rather a description of an object.

Length of essays
Although the tutor asked the students not to surpass the 100 word-limit, two of them did so: Billege by one and Hajdú by two words. The word number of the other four students’ essays varied between 93 and 100.

Students covered the topic in five to nine sentences. Eight appeared as the most frequent number of sentences.

Paragraphs
All of the participants intended the beginning of the paragraphs. Kárpáti and Billege did not divide their essays into more paragraphs, but the others did. Bacskay, Hatta and Kamahari paragraphed their essays into introduction, discussion and conclusion.

Passive form
They verbs push the sentence forward and give it a momentum. Active verbs push hard passive verbs tug fitfully. Most verbs also carry somewhere in their imagery or in their sound a suggestion of what they mean (Zinsser 111). Reading the participants’ essays I wanted to know how they had applied Zinsser’s tip-- avoiding the passive form. I found that all but two students took the advice. In writing about a sensual experience the active verbs made the images more vivid.

The first and last words of the essays
The first and last words of an essay are significant because they contribute the basic mood to the script. Bacskay’s and Kamahari’s first word was I. It personalised the essay and showed that the authors talked about a real experience. Kárpáti chose what, Billege the and Hatta this as for first words. These beginnings seemed more general, and they weakened the essays. Bacskay’s 2a began with the word finally which the tutor changed to when in 2b. But finally it remained finally in 2c. This word carried more tension than the word when. The word finally contained the state of excitement and waiting Bacskay wanted to express. Hajdú’s touching was also a strong beginning as it is one of the five senses itself.

Many participants closed their essays with key words, such as feeling (Billege), taste (Kamahari), soap-opera (Bacskay 2a, 2b and 2c) and rest (Bacskay 1). Hatta’s last word, mug, solved the mystery of the essay because the author played a guessing game by not revealing it till the end.

Conclusion
When I started the research I expected that the miniature essay had meant a special task to the students. The task proved to be special in that they had to describe a sensual experience in the most concrete way they could. This helped them to practise concrete language, and it also aimed to encourage them to use more active verbs that could push harder (Zinsser 111). Writing the mini essays also taught them to economise on words and to avoid clutter. But the task did not prove to be special in the way that they had to apply all the tips and rules they had had learned. The main idea in writing essays in small size was to give an overview to students of their writings. Analysing the essays I learnt about other students’ writing styles and their vocabularies, and profited from the strengths and weaknesses discovered in the essays.