W 097 F

1. Introduction

Essay-writing is one of the four components of the proficiency test, taken by all first-year English majors at JPU. Writing an essay is a complex task which requires well-developed skills, including thorough grammatical and syntactical grounding, rich vocabulary, and reliable stylistic knowledge, as well as intense mental work. Good writers have something important to say: they ask a question, come up with a new idea, or a new aspect of a theme, and shares their thoughts with the readers. They want people to obtain pieces of information, make them think and form their own opinions. In order to achieve this purpose they put their ideas into words in a logical order. They pay attention not to submit to their wayward thoughts and not to wander off the theme. The lack of a coherent train of thought makes it impossible for the readers to follow the text (Trapl, 1997).

There are five significant requirements which students are obliged to meet in order to pass the essay-writing test: Focus, Accuracy, Vocabulary, Paragraph Organization. and Essay Development. The aim of the present paper is to reveal the essence of the Focus criterion by answering the question what makes an essay well-focused.

2. Methods

To answer my research question, I made a thorough study on proficiency tests taken by English major students at Janus Pannonius University in 1996. I examined fourteen tests from two different points of view.

(1) First I compared essays dealing with discussing/explaining/analysing how to e-mail a friend. The purpose of this comparison was to demonstrate and prove the importance of the writers' awareness of their theme.
(2) Then, to investigate my question much more deeply, I read and compared essays on one theme: 'explain how to e-mail a friend'. Studying this question, I had to consider and think over the rather vague meaning of the phrase: 'essays on the same topic'. However, this task gave me a good opportunity to examine how different people approach the same concrete theme.

3. Results and Discussion
3.1. Understanding and Determining the Purpose

Comparing different approaches to the theme: 'how to e-mail a fiend', I assumed: writing a competent essay begins with the understanding and the right interpretation of the topic writers intend to investigate. Moreover, it is crucial for them to write about a subject they know or can learn something about. With this criterion in view, the testing team provided the students with a theme selection table, which offered them a wide range of topics (Horváth, 1996, p.92). The students could choose from a large variety of themes that they had ideas or personal experience about, and that they would develop in their pieces of writing. In spite of this, nine students failed to submit a well-focused essay. This failure is partly due to that the writers did not decide or did not understand the purpose of their own essays.

The majority of the students (eleven of them) chose to "explain" the theme. The popularity of this topic can be explained by the general meaning and easy interpretation of the verb 'explain'. It requires from the writer to make a given theme clear or familiar for another person. It does not demand a lot of effort from anybody who is an expert in the given subject. But students who decided to "analyse" the theme often confined themselves to superficial treatment of the problem, not understanding or not deciding their purpose before writing. Analysing a theme requires much more deep mental involvement in studying a question. Writers should examine their topics by dividing them into separate elements in order to get a new piece of information about the subject investigated. Those students who chose to "discuss" the theme made a mistake by simplifying and restricting their topic to the themes: 'give your opinion' or 'give an explanation'. However, "discussing" covers the meaning: 'consider something from several points of view'.

As we have seen, it is essential for writers to ask themselves what their purpose is, why they are exerting their energy and straining their brain in order to produce a piece of writing. A well-focused essay is unimaginable without clear understanding and firm determining of the given theme.

3.2. Brainstorming and Making Drafts

"The most efficient method of writing involves thinking about what to say and how to say it before beginning to compose". (McMahan, 1989, p.14). When writers have decided the theme they intend to write about, they should make notes about the main ideas they want to present and develop, and determine the order in which they will arrange their thoughts logically. Studying the proficiency essays, I realized that ten of the fourteen students prefered to make a draft or an outline, writing down every idea that came to mind concerning their subject. It is a wise and useful method, since it enables the writers to stick to the theme determined in the first paragraph of the essays. The main ideas put down in the outline of the essay serve as the major points and guidelines to the text. If the writers follow these points they have a great chance to create a well-focused essay.

3.3 Essays 'on the same topic'

The more a writer can limit or specify his subject, the more likely he is to concentrate his attention on concrete information rather than vague impression. Here my aim is to demonstrate and analyse the results given by examining how students managed to produce a well-focused essay on the specified subject: 'explain how to e-mail a friend'. The reason why I decided to study essays on the same topic is that this method gave me a good chance to make a reliable comparison. (Weir, 1993, p.56).

Studying eleven essays on the same topic, I drew the conclusion that the essays differ from each other to a large extent regarding the approach to the topic, the point of view from which writers manage a question. Approaching a given theme includes the writers' attitude towards the topic as well: the more they are interested in the theme investigated, the more deeply they can be immersed in work, and the more they can concentrate their attention on it.

The students who decided to 'explain how to e-mail a friend' had to focus on three elements: 'explanation', 'how to e-mail', and 'a friend'. Almost all the students considered the 'how to e-mail' part to be the central point of the theme: from the eleven students only one 'explained what to e-mail' and not 'how to e-mail'. The writer of the essay 'explain what to e-mail a friend' suggested that at the beginning it is advisable to write only short messages because even two or three sentences can use up a lot of energy of a beginner. Seven students 'explained' the topic successfully. However, there was one extreme case when the writer dealt with 'how to e-mail' but instead of 'explaining' he or she composed a long paragraph 'discussing' that different servers cannot talk with each other because their structures are not the same. Only two students concentrated on 'a friend' and most of them ignored this further restriction while 'explaining how to e-mail', addressing their words to 'someone in general who does not know anything about email'. These students prefered to use subjects and pronouns in the third person singular. For example: the first thing a student has to do is to ask for a username from the computer assistant of his or her university. Another common expression of 'someone in general' is the impersonal subject: 'one': one must go into the computer room where the computers are stored. Then, after having sat down in front of a computer set one has to enter the Internet. I think these examples help understand that writers can produce an excellently well-focused essay if they fulfil all the three requirement at the same time.

3.4 The Writing Process

The cross-markers defined two important criteria as they evaluated the essays. (Horváth, 1996, p.95):
(1) Does the essay define a specific idea in the first paragraph?
(2) Does the essay discuss this idea with specific examples?

3.4.1. Defining a Specific Idea in the First Paragraph

A well-focused introductory paragraph should be restricted, unified, and precise. "To be restricted, an introduction must limit the scope of an essay to what can be discussed in detail in the space available" (Trimmer and Sommers, 1984, p.102). Writers should force themselves to avoid making general statements and giving a simplified summary of what everyone already knows. It is not enough to merely identify an area in which a subject needs to be developed; a carefully worded introduction indicates the specific subject someone is writing about. "A good first paragraph should be unified as well: it must express only one idea. To try to deal with more than one idea in a short essay would result in superficial treatment. Finally, a perfect introduction should be precise, that is it should be so stated that it can have only one interpretation" (Trimmer and Sommers, 1984, p.104). Most of the students wrote a good introductory paragraph: from the eleven students who decided to 'explain how to e-mail a friend', eight wrote about the necessity of computers in everyday communication, praised the Internet for the cheap, easy, and fast way of getting information and sending a mesage to a friend. Problems emerged when having come up with a workable topic the students continued searching their minds to further develop their topic.

3.4 Development of the Theme Determined in the First Paragraph

A correlation analysis was conducted to determine the relationship between the marks awarded in the five evaluation categories (Horváth, 1996, p.98). The hypothesis that the greatest correlation would between the scores for Focus and Essay Organization proved to be true. More than half of the students who chose 'explain how to e-mail a friend' got the same score for these two criteria. There was only one extreme example when a student got seven points for Focus while the organization of the essay was evaluated with a low score three. The cause of this large difference between the marks of the two categories was that the writer wrote a well-focused piece of writing, which was a letter rather than an essay.

The reason for the large correlation between Focus and Essay Organization is that during the whole writing process the writer must focus on the topic determined in the introduction. The highest score in the essays I investigated was seven. From eleven students nine had some problems with focusing on the theme and, larger or smaller, strayed from the point. For example, instead of explaining how to e-mail a friend, a student wrote a whole paragraph about how long people have to wait to get at a computer. Another student gave a detailed description about that it is difficult to find letters on the keyboard, and this activity requires a lot of practice.

4. Conclusion

It is not easy to write about the theme that the writer wanted to write about. It requires a lot of mental effort to focus on a specific theme and inexperienced writers occasionally have difficulty writing with a purpose, because they see so many purposes. Writers consciously have to exert themselves to develop the skill of concentration on a topic. Having finished studying the essays, I drew my attention to the cross-markers' comments directed at evaluating the five requirements of the papers ( Cross-markers' comments on proficiency test essays, 1997). This activity made me realize that it is advisable to follow the instructions given in connection with the Focus criterion, if a writer would like to create an appreciable piece of writing. Moreover, if writers want to set the impression of a professional, of an expert, they must stick to their topic firmly. This activity enables them to write a convincing essay that carries the readers with itself, thanks to its high Focus quality.