Undergraduate Essay Writing – VII
Representation of the Essay’s Structure
Fundamental to an exploration of how a message is structured is the concept of ‘theme’ and ‘new’. The theme refers to the point of departure of the message, for example in the clause ‘teaching is a challenging occupation’, the point of departure is ‘teaching‘. The message is about teaching. The new refers to what is to be said about the point of departure: in the case of teaching, it is a challenging occupation. This message is not the same as ‘a challenging occupation is teaching’ which, by virtue of its different point of departure, is functioning to serve a different purpose.
Each sentence of the essay has its own theme that foregrounds what the sentence is going to be about, and its own new that supplies the details about this message. For example, this sentence from one of the essays is analysed thematically as:
Theme: The reason and motives for a particular eating habit or for a particular social custom
New: may be explained as being simply natural or normal behaviour.
However, an analysis of the themes and news of every sentence in the essay would do little to reveal the overall organisation of the essay, since it would fail to reveal the way that sentences are grouped together in paragraphs which represent the next level in a hierarchy of textual meanings. In order to capture the larger scale of analysis of theme and new at the paragraph level, the terms ‘hyper-theme’ and ‘hyper-new’ are used (Martin, 1992). These textual strategies are used by writers to highlight the point of departure of each new paragraph, and the accumulated things said about that point throughout the paragraph, as can be seen in the paragraph from which the example sentence was drawn:
Hyper-theme: The concept of culture further brings an understanding of why these learned behaviours are reproduced as they are.
The reasons and motives for a particular habit or for a particular social custom may be explained as being simply natural or normal behaviour. People become so much a part of their culture that the reasons and motives behind actions become lost.
Hyper-new: The concept of culture then adds to our understanding that things are done in certain ways in a society because they are learnt and acquired, not because it is human nature.
Even such an analysis at paragraph level, however, would not be adequate in capturing the whole structure of the essay, since it would not account for the way that the paragraphs are related to each other and to the overall purpose of the essay. In order to capture this hierarchically higher level of organisational meaning, the notions of ‘macro-theme’ and ‘macro-new’ are needed to identify the role of the essay’s introduction and conclusion respectively, as shown in these excerpts from the example essay:
Macro-theme: (introduction to the essay)
The concept of culture can contribute to our understanding of how social order is maintained in a society. With the concept of culture, once can better understand that the behaviour of a society is learned. It can give insight into why there are so many different societies operating in different ways or, on the other hand, . . .
Hyper-theme: (from paragraph 6 of the essay)
The concept of culture further brings an understanding of why these learned behaviours are reproduced as they are.
The reasons and motives for a particular eating habit or for a particular social custom may be explained as being simply natural . . .
Macro-new: (conclusion to the essay)
To conclude, the concept of culture contributes a great deal to our understanding of how a society works. By examining and interpreting all the shared products of a society, we can see how social order is maintained, why people behave the way . . .
In seeking to assess the validity of our assertion that successful essays reveal their organisational structure explicitly, our analysis sought to identify the degree to which the essays’ introductions or macro-themes, predicted the paragraphs, or hyper-themes; and the degree to which the hyper-theme of each paragraph predicted the rest of the paragraph. By tracking these textual elements through the texts, a thumbnail sketch was drawn of each essay which was referred to as the degree of ‘predictive scaffolding’. Those essays with a high degree of predictive scaffolding tended to be the most successful ones according to the markers’ ratings.
To illustrate how critical this textual scaffolding is in revealing the essay’s structure to the reader, two essays will be compared, those of Student 2 and Student 19. These two cases have been chosen because they best exemplify the results. The essay structure of Student 19 is easily apparent, and can be plotted according to the hyper-themes of each paragraph in the body of the essay, for example:
Paragraph 2: Culture can contribute to our understanding of our society when we realise that humans are the only animals who hold culture as a means of survival.
Paragraph 3: Culture assists us in understanding actions in our society.
Paragraph 4: Language is one of the most important elements of culture and, therefore, society.
Paragraph 5: We can look at society changing through the existence and development of culture.
Through merely examining the hyper-themes of the paragraphs, it is possible to establish a clear picture of the way that the essay is structured. Moreover, each of the main sections of the essay had already been presented in the essay’s introduction, as a way of signposting to the reader how the essay was to be structured. This essay displayed the highest degree of predictive scaffolding of all the essays in the corpus.
In sharp contrast, the essay by Student 2 lacks a clear indication of the main point being developed in each paragraph. The difficulty for the reader in understanding its structure is revealed through an analysis of its hyper-themes, for example:
Paragraph 8: Hollsteiner relates culture to a biological organism, in that each of its parts is related in some way to all other parts.
Paragraph 9: The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud compared culture to such devices as artificial limbs, eye glasses and false teeth.
Paragraph 10: “Culture, then, consists of standards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards for deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about it.” (W. Goodenough, 1963, pp. 258-259)
Paragraph 11: Society “a group of persons joined together for a common purpose or by a common interest” (according to World Book Dictionary).
The fact that the essay was divided into 37 ‘paragraphs’ made it even more difficult to understand whether and how ideas were related to each other, since the use of paragraphing did not contribute to building up a picture of how the ideas were related to each other. For example, paragraphs 10 and 11 were each comprised only of their hyper-themes, that is, as presented above. The entire message of these two paragraphs was conveyed with a large quotation, a pattern which recurred in another 13 paragraphs comprising only hyper-themes. In every case, the quotation stood alone without interpretation or comment about its significance. This lack of assimilation of quotations into the essay is manifest at the beginning of paragraph 10. Here, the section quoted includes the word “then” from Goodenough (Culture, then, . . .”). Quoted outside the broader context of Goodenough’s argument, this link is illogical. The student has not developed any arguments yet which can be accumulated to a conclusion in this way through the use of “then”. Instead, the student has merely copied the quotation uncritically without establishing its relationship to the essay.
In general, very few hyper-themes in Student 2′s essay served the purpose of establishing what their paragraphs were about. Similarly, the introduction to the essay was inadequate in foregrounding the essay’s purpose and structure. The resultant low level of predictive scaffolding in the essay demonstrates a lack of purposeful analysis of the readings to solve the problem posed by the essay question. Instead, the essay is an assemblage of relevant ideas and information, presented as independent entities without an observable logic in the structure and sequence of the parts.
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