LECTURE  IX DEALING WITH TEXTS (PART 1)

1. TYPES OF DISCOURSE       

2. READING STRATEGIES       

3. WHAT TITLES TELL US       

4. DIFFERENT WAYS OF PRESENTING INFORMATION         

1. TYPES OF DISCOURSE

 

(THE FUNCTION OF A TEXT AND HOW IT DETERMINES THE WAY WE READ IT)

According to James Kinneavy (in A Theory of Discourse), there are two basic types of discourse (i.e., text).

A. the type (or mode) of discourse whose main function is to EXPRESS the feelings, ideas, emotions, beliefs, wishes, in­tentions, etc. of the WRITER or SPEAKER

Examples: diaries, personal journals, prayers, manifestos, contracts, constitutions, religious credos, myths

B. the type (or mode) of discourse whose primary function is to COMMUNICATE something TO A READER or LISTENER.

 

In COMMUNICATIVE discourse, according to Kinneavy, the emphasis can be on one of three different aspects of the communicative process:

REFERENTIAL

Emphasis on:

 

LITERARY

Emphasis on:

 

Form of Presentation The

PERSUASIVE

Emphasis on:

 

The effect on the

 Reader that the

 subject-matter is

 meant to have.

 

 

Subject Matter,

 

Information:

 

The information

 

is presented, described,

 

Defined, diagnosed,

 

Proved, or related in

 

an informative manner

 

 

 

Examples:

 

      

        Examples:                                         Examples:

        novels                                               advertisements

        poems                                               sermons

 

Textbooks

 

scientific articles

 

                                            dramas                                              political speeches

 

                                            Jokes

 

It is important to remember that texts are seldom purely Referential, Literary, or Persuasive. Most texts have some of the characteristics of more than one of these categories, but they belong primarily in one of them. The determining factor is prob­ably the writer's intention: i.e., the primary function that he intended his text to serve. The types overlap because, for ex­ample, the writer may have intended his text to be primarily persuasive, but he may well have found it necessary to include a lot of referential material, informing the reader about the sub­ject and even supplying scientific facts to sound more convinc­ing. He may also have found it effective to employ certain liter­ary techniques in order to be especially persuasive (e.g., he may have used jokes, rhymed verse, or figures of speech to make the text livelier and to have a stronger effect on his readers).

However, each of these three types of discourse (determined by the writer's primary purpose) has its own interior logic, its own traditional organizational patterns, and its own stylistic peculiarities (e.g., the level of the language — its formality or informality).

If the reader can recognize the determining features of the type of text he has in front of him (e.g., if he recognizes the traditional form of a scientific report, with its sections devoted to the writer's hypothesis, the report on the experiment, the results of the experiment, and the writer's conclusions) then he knows something useful about HOW TO READ IT.

Questions:

a. Which part of a scientific report would you read carefully (after glancing briefly through the rest of the text), if you're not really interested in how the experiment was done or why it was done, but you know you will be required to explain why it was important?

b. Which of the three types of discourse would you nor­mally read most intensively, hardly skipping a word?

c. Why does a joke stop being funny when you try to ex­plain it?

d. Which of the three types of discourse would it normally be safest to glance over superficially, simply to get a general idea of what the writer is getting at?

Exercise A:

1. Using Kinneavy's categories, how would you describe the following piece of discourse («On Silence»)? Is it in the style of a diary or journal? — of a textbook? — of a novel or a poem? — of a sermon? — of any other kind of writing with which you are familiar?

2. What is the common assumption about the nature of silence that the writer intends to qualify or modify in some way?

3. What geographic location does the writer seem to have in mind while describing the various types of silence?

ON SILENCE

Extract from the «Wartime Writings: 1939-44» of Antoine de Saint-Exupery (The Yew York Times Book Review, Sept. 14,1986).

One silence even diners from another. There is the tranquil silence when tribes are at peace, when night brings coolness and one seems to be anchored with furled sails in a quiet har­bor. There is the midday silence when the sun suspends all thought and movement. There is the deceptive silence when the north wind bears down, bringing insects borne like pollen from the oases of the interior and heralding the advent of a sandstorm from the East. There is the silence of conspiracy when it is known that a distant tribe is preparing to revolt. There is the silence of mystery when the Arabs are gathered together for one of their secret meetings. There is the pregnant silence when the messenger is late returning, the shrill silence when in the night one holds one's breath in order to hear, the melancholy silence when one remembers one's beloved.

Exercise B:

There are many different organizational or discourse struc­tures which may be used in creating any type of text. Some of the common patterns are: describing, defining, comparing, contrasting, analyzing, giving examples, classifying, presenting information chronologically, presenting information of a cause and/or effect nature. Which type(s) of organization seem to apply to the excerpt «On Silence»?

 

2. READING STRATEGIES

DIFFERENT KINDS OF TEXTS, SERVING DIFFERENT PURPOSES, REQUIRE DIFFERENT READING STRATEGIES

The following are the most commonly used strategies for reading scientific texts:

A. SKIMMING -                                                                                                             This involves:

1. Reading through the opening section until you have some idea of what the writer's thesis is — what he's out to reveal or prove. Usually the first paragraph will be enough, but some­times the writer doesn't get down to his actual thesis until after a few introductory paragraphs. If this seems to be the case, glance over the introductory section and only begin reading carefully after the writer actually gets down to the issue he's presently concerned with. Then when you feel you know what his thesis is, you can start to «skim» rapidly through the rest of the text.

2. Glancing over the rest of the text, paragraph by para­graph, trying to locate the key sentence within each paragraph and to follow the writer's train of thought (to follow his argu­ment). If you get lost (if you find that you no longer know what he's talking about) backtrack a bit and try to find out where you got lost and what new idea he introduced at that point (you may have missed it because it was in the middle of a paragraph, and not at the beginning or end, where new ideas are most commonly introduced).

3. Reading through the closing section to see if you actually did understand the thesis in the opening section (which, pre­sumably, you were able to follow by glancing through the body of the text). The conclusion usually refers back to the opening and confirms the thesis presented there, sometimes summariz­ing the important material in the body of the text which was meant to support the thesis.

B. SCANNING

This involves glancing over the individual lines of the text, looking for specific pieces of information (names, dates, sub­titles, a key sentence introducing a specific idea you're par­ticularly interested in, the place in the text where one section ends and a new idea is introduced, etc.)

C. READING INTENSIVELY

Once you know which parts of the text contain the infor­mation you're particularly interested in, you can concentrate on reading those parts with special care, weighing each word to make sure that you haven't misunderstood or missed anything the writer communicated either directly (explicitly) or indi­rectly (implicitly). Look up the words you don't understand in a good dictionary. If you're not sure you understood exactly what the writer means, go back to see if the preceding context is helpful. If that doesn't help, read ahead to see if what fol­lows clarifies for you.

Exercise:

The following list includes various kinds of texts. Decide which of the three strategies — or which combination of them, and in what order — would be suitable for each:

1. a menu

2. a page in the dictionary

3. a road map

4. a diagram in a scientific article

5. an article in a scientific journal reporting on the research of someone in your field whose work you admire

6. an article in «Time» or «Newsweek»

7. a caption under a photograph

8. a page in the telephone book

9. an advertisement for something you're thinking of buying

10. a label on a food package

11. instructions for the use of a new appliance

12. the note included in the box of a prescription drug giving active ingredients, dosage, side effects, storage instruc­tions, etc.

13. a book on your course bibliography

14. a poem

15. a short story

16. a novel

17. a set of classroom notes borrowed from your friend before the final exam in a course you have seldom attended

18. an article written by a professor whose course you're taking

 

3. WHAT TITLES TELL US

Below is a list of text titles followed by a set of questions. Answer the questions by relating them to each of the text titles on the list.

1. Why Computers Can't Be Poets

2. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century

3. Crime and Poverty

4. Rethinking the Holocaust

5. Overcoming Unemployment

6. The Task of Modern Philosophy

7. Towards A Humanistic Medicine in A Modern Age

8. Morality and Foreign Policy

9. Learning the Hard Way: How to Help Children with Learning Disorders.

10. What is A Historical Fact?

11. Education and the I.Q.

12.The Economic Organization of the Prisoner of War Camp

13. A Cultural History of the French Revolution

14. Political Development and Social Change

15. A Brief History of Time

16. The Common Interest: How Our Social Welfare Policies Don't Work, and What We Can Do About Them

17. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Conse­quences

18. Signs in the Wilderness

Questions:

a. Within what academic field/s does this text probably be­long?

b. (i) Does the title reveal what the specific subject of the text is, or does it keep you guessing? (Note that sometimes the title keeps you guessing, but the sub-title explains it), (ii) Glance at the brief abstract under the title «Signs in the Wil­derness» in Part IV. Could you have guessed what the subject of this text is from its title? (Why not?)

ñ. Does the title reveal whether the subject matter is highly specialized (and hence suitable for professionals) or general (and hence suitable for a wider audience of laymen)?

d. Most titles include more than one concept (e.g., «Why Computers Can't be Poets»; «Crime and Poverty»; «What is A Historical Fact?» (This includes the concept of «historicity», or of being historically authentic; and the concept of being factual). What, if anything, does the title you are considering imply or state directly about the relationship between the con­cepts it includes?

e. Does the title (or subtitle) reveal anything about the writer's thesis, or his point of view with regard to the sub­ject of the article?

 

4. DIFFERENT WAYS OF PRESENTING INFORMATION

The writer of a text may decide to present part of the infor­mation graphically instead of (or as well as) verbally. He may introduce diagrams, pictorial representations, or flowcharts to illustrate a sequence of concepts or operations and the rela­tionships between them. Diagrams and other schematic forms of presentation can help to clarify complex verbal expositions. They also tend to be easier to remember.

Note how the following flowchart simplifies and clarifies the verbal exposition that follows it:

 

Figure 5 Flowchart of «Waves» text (from Geva 1983: 387), from: «Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading» Cavell and Eskey

 

WAVES

Waves are caused, as nearly everyone knows, by the wind.Two classes of waves may be distinguished; the long roll­ers at the coast, and the far more irregular forms of the open seas, where waves of all sizes and types are present. The size and speed of waves depends not only on the wind's speed but on the length of time the wind has been blowing, and the unbroken stretch of water over which it blows as well. Very strong winds tend to beat down the waves' height and to re­duce wave speed. On the other hand, less violent but steady winds often produce wave speeds greater than that of the wind itself. The average maximum wave length is about 36 feet, although occasional higher waves have been measured.