Introduction
Konkrete Sprache, certus oratius, concreto estilo, concret diction -- all of them have the same meaning: concrete language. Concrete language is an essential element of writing skills; it is supposed to be specific, adequate, entire and light but it is difficult to produce one in any language.
In a descriptive or analytic essay, the problem is more complicated, and the case is just getting more difficult when students have to write the essay in a foreign language. The phrases, expressions and sayings are learnt and not automatic as in their first language.
In this paper I will present a few features of concrete language in writing by giving a survey on this specific problem so that the reader will develop how to avoid it.
Method
I collected nine miniature essays because -- according to my previous experiences -- I found this task really expedient and crucial. I chose the essays randomly from students of Janus Pannonius University’s English Department, in April, 1998. All of the students attend the same course, called Writing and Research Skills, which supervised Horváth József whose aim was "to enable [students] to write in fluent, accurate, and plain English and [improve their] planning, sequencing, presenting, packaging and editing skills.”
Till the end of the semester students had to present a portfolio including a minimum of five essays from their collection. One of these essays had to be a miniature, expressing an emotion, feeling, state, thought or physical experience that is unforgettable or significant in their lives. Moreover, the writer had to prove and develop descriptive skills in an essay which contains a maximum of 100 words.
After the selection of the miniature collection I started analysing their concrete language, focusing on titles, the length of the essays, the first and last words, special meanings of each word (such as iconic, symbolic, cultural and hermeneutic æ according to Sári László’s analysis), poetical images, use of verbs and adjectives, personal voice and the description of the inside and outside world.
Results and Discussion
Giving name to a new-born child is not easy; title-giving is similar to this experience. A well-chosen title always predicts the topic to the reader: it has to be short and adequate in connection with the writing, carrying the overall image of itself. Many writer of the miniatures solved this problem by choosing titles which referred precisely to the experience or feeling. For example, Pintér Katalin’s "Feeling Dejected"; Fónai Annamária’s "A Terrible Fever"; Bokodi Judit’s "Fatigue"; Sándor Bernadett’s "The Feeling Of Sleepiness" and Dózsa Éva’s "Feeling Cold".
But the real challenge for the writers was to keep their say within certain boundaries, that is the extension had to stay 100 word. The reduction of the number of words made the whole text captious; this length seemed to be too short and nearly all of the writers overstepped this limit by using 157 words in Dózsa Éva's essay or 148 words in Pintér Katalin’s case. Probably one of the reasons was that the writers wrote an introduction and a conclusion instead of considering their chosen theme closely.
Observing the words which built up the miniatures, I think that reducing the number of words helps to pay more attention to the function of them. Looking at the essays I found an intriguing feature of drafts: the emphasis of the first and last word in the context. In most of the essays they are the alpha and the omega of the meanings. The best example for this is Bakonyi Berta’s essay that starts with the pronoun ‘I’ and ends with ‘ONE’, and these two words carry the meaning of the whole essay which is about being a part of nature.
To make an essay colourful and remarkable we can use the special meanings what words contain. All words are to signify something which can be a different representation, a so-called code.
In some texts when a sign refers to something as a constituent of the possible world, we call it iconic sign, although, at the same time it represents itself. The words trap, bridge, butterfly from Pintér Katalin’s, Vajda Violetta’s and Kaszás Henrietta’s essays give perfect examples. These words stand for not only for themselves, but they help to the reader to imagine them in iconic context.
But there are words which refer to something else than they denote. The connection between the signifier and the object determined by the conventions of cultures or subcultures around. There are a few examples: reminiscence, nothing or passion in Kaszás Henrietta’s miniature, where the sign itself occurs as a reference.
Going further in the explanation of the words we arrive at the cultural signs where symbolic signs are stated within prescribed rules and prohibitions of a culture, and this makes them more specific. For example Kárpáti Andrea’s essay which refers to a funeral and this word carries symbolic as well as cultural meaning.
Hermeneutic signs can include the iconic, symbolic and the cultural layers of representation. Somehow they transcend this world and enter into a mysterious and uncanny one. I chose a few examples from Kaszás Henrietta’s miniature, such as sense, time, soul. All of them represent something untouchable, they carry an enigma within their inner part, what you can approach by opening, understanding the hiding layers but the mystery will be still there at the end.
Going further on this field, I would like to direct attention to the poetical images in miniatures. Metaphors, similes, repetitions and rhyming words can refresh the whole text. Unfortunately, only one writer used this opportunity to make her essay more colourful and satisfactory (Kaszás Henrietta).
Use of specific verbs and many adjectives help to emphasise the expression of the experience; they make the texts more visual, audible and experimental, for example in Fónai Annamária’s essay: roam, collapse, drip, suffer, fall.
Writing an essay about one's feeling or experience must be private and confidential in a way. To achieve this target, the writer may use a personal voice aiming and maintaining the reader's intimate feeling and this would make the essay more realistic, experimental and believable.
From the aspect of the readers' reactions the writers often managed to make every moment special and omnipresent. The two-folded delineation of the inside and outside world's description in parallel happened in many mini essays. An outstanding example is Fónai Annamária’s in which she emphasised her physical experience with her environment's changing.
Conclusion
Making a research paper on concrete language did not seem to be an easy task but I tried to find some helping tips for everyone who might need it. I had the pleasure to select some miniatures and provide typical examples for various cases with the help of them.
I can only hope that I satisfied the expectations and the readers find a direct way to concrete language.
Showing posts with label concreteness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label concreteness. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
W 066 F
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.
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.
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