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INTRODUCTION
English major students at Janus Pannonius University in Pécs are required to attend a course which aims to improve their writing and research skills. During the term students have to submit a portfolio, a collection of their personal essays.

They have a wide range of optional topics listed at the beginning of the course so that they have enough time to work on them. Students get tips in sessions on how to improve their writings. They also read works of William Zinsser and portfolios of previous-year students. The tutor reads the first drafts of their essays and gives advice for making them better.

During the course students learn about the elements of concrete language use, which they can apply to their own writings. That is why I have chosen to examine these factors in the essays. The basis of my research contains nine scripts of five portfolios that students wrote during the autumn semester of 1998. I will examine how concretely students express their ideas in their essays. (For further analysis on students' portfolio scripts see Bauer 1998.)

I selected the following essays out of the possible forty:

1. “Miami Studio” by Barabás Mariann
2. “The Tutor” by Horváth József and Barabás Mariann
3. “About a Boy” by Krutek László
4. “Joe' s Office” by Krutek László
5. “The Girl in the Mirror” by Piskó Beáta
6. “Stepping out into a Different World” by Piskó Beáta
7. “Five-Two-Seven” by Fehér Fatime
8. “About me as an Outsider” by Kópis Andrea
9. “One of the Most Beautiful Places in the World: The Transfogaras Mountains” by Kópis Andrea

(From now on I will refer to the essays by using their number in this order.)

Barabás Mariann shares her experience in a beauty salon with us when she accompanied her friend to get artificial nails. In her other essay she describes her tutor. Krutek László gives his own profile form an outsider' s point of view in “About a boy”. His other writing is about what he saw when he visited his teacher' s new office. Piskó Beáta has the two longest essays. The first is about one of her days, as someone else would see it. In the other one she leads us to Egypt. Fehér Fatime did not have a person' s description in her collection so I used only one of her works. It is about her room in the secondary school dorm she used to live. The author of the last two essays is Kópis Andrea. We can read her portrait from an outsider's prospect. The last piece takes us to Transylvania where our guide is Kópis Andrea.

METHOD
During this semester the tutor gave nine options to the students, out of which seven are represented in the five portfolios I examined. For the distribution of the essays in the five portfolios see Table 1.

There were two types which none of the five students chose: one is when the students have to record the essay on a tape, and the other is when they have to write two essays with different first and last paragraphs, but the rest is same. Two students wrote filter-test type essays, which is a writing task they have to complete at an exam at the end of the first year. It gives 125 theme choices for the students. Another possibility was to write an essay together with another student or the tutor. Other options were to describe how they use their thesaurus, how they write or describe any place they had been to. Out of the four profile-type essays three were self-description from the point of view of an outsider and one was about another person.

Table 1: Distribution of essay-types in the portfolios

I chose two types of essays for my analysis which most students had in their collection: place description, which all portfolios contained, and the profile, which only four students wrote. That gives the number of nine essays, which gave the basis for the analysis.

The concreteness of the text is associated with the verbs that are used in it because they “push the sentence forward and give it momentum. Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully. Most verbs also carry somewhere in their sound a suggestion of what they mean” (Zinsser 1998, 111). Therefore, I counted the verbs comparing to the number of words, grouped them from different aspects. I examined whether they are active or passive verbs, meaningful verbs or 'be'-forms. I grouped them according to the number of syllables they consist of.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
According to the length of the essays the number of verbs shows an even distribution. In all essays it falls between 12.5 - 17.7 %. It was the lowest in the last and the highest in the second writing.

Table 2: Distribution of verbs in the essays

When we compare the number of active verbs with that of passive verbs we can find similarities, too. In the second and third essays the authors did not use any passive verbs. In the essays No 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 there was only one passive verb. The two profiles have not got any and the rest have only one passive verb in them. Perhaps the type of the task determines the number of passive verbs. Observing the percentage of passive verbs we can find the same result. All the place descriptions have more than 2 percent and all but one of the character-descriptions have less than that. The highest result comes with the longest work. There is one more result that sticks out: one of the profiles (No 8) has a high percentage of passive verbs, but this derives from the brevity of the writing. It still has only one passive verb in it.

Table 3: Number and percentage of active and passive verbs

I grouped the verbs: those which carry meaning and the different 'be'-forms. The proportion of this latter varied between 14.5 - 36.6 %. This shows bigger difference between the pieces of writings than the previous results, the highest is in the eighth and the lowest is in the fifth essay. Even this result shows that meaningful verbs dominate the texts: 379 verbs out of 493 (77%) were of that category. I made subcategories within this group. I thought that examining the length of the verbs is relevant for the shorter the verb the more powerful it is, and the more concrete meaning it carries. I counted the syllables of the verbs apart from the 'be'-forms and found that there was only one verb with more than four syllables in the nine essays and only 68 verbs contained two or three syllables. These altogether make 69, only 14% of all verbs.

Table 4: Number and percentage of ‘be’-forms and the subcategorisation of meaningful verbs by their syllables

In the nine scripts 63% of all verbs (310 out of 493) were meaningful, one-syllable verbs. This result significantly shows that writers of these essays use shorter, more concrete verbs.

CONCLUSION
After examining the verbs of the texts I found that the short and active verbs are dominant, which makes the writings concrete.

In another research it would be worth to analyse these factors among students who have not participated in the course. Comparing those results with that of my research we could see how much it is influenced by the factor that students were conscious of using concrete language in their essays.

This result may interest English major students, especially those whose scripts I have used for my research. Other students who are involved with similar research can use my results as a reference material.