Undergraduate Essay Writing – VI
Product of Essay Writing
Because the data for linguistic analysis were so unwieldy, with a total of some 40,000 words in the corpus of texts, the aim of the early readings of the essays was to identify which of a wide range of linguistic analyses would yield the most revealing thumbnail sketches of the essays. After several readings, a hypothesis was formed that some of the essays were easier to read because they provided explicit structural clues to allow the reader to predict what would follow. This aspect of the language, referred to as the textual metafunction (Halliday, 1985), concerns the way in which meanings are organised for presentation as a written text. Thus the first analysis involved documenting the way that certain textual devices were used to make the structure of the text transparent to the reader.
TROY (1)