Study the examples below and differentiate between various purposes the author of the piece of writing has.

Descriptive rhetorical function:

1) Describing

The following paragraph describes a building:

The largest building, in the very centre of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. The house is very old. There is about it a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall - but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other. The building looks completely deserted. Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town.

2) Reporting and narrating

                             Drama in language teaching

Plays have been employed to teach skill in language only since the Middle Ages. In Greece and Rome performing on stage was beneath the dignity of the class whose children could afford to go to school and a social ban remained on this activity until the tenth century, when a German abbess, Hroswitha, composed Latin plays for her novices. The expressed aim was to replace the plays of Plautus and Terence, then considered too saucy for use in the cloister. Owing to the now usual way of acting out the Bible stories in mystery plays, stage work was not an unusual recreation among clerics. Latin plays, written in the classical manner, were often played in the monasteries by the troupes of monks who staged the mystery plays in the churchyard.

Taking their cue from these mystery plays, the Jesuits developed another approach. Many of their plays were in a classical style, but the characters were abstractions drawn from grammar and literary criticism. The plays were meant both to drill pupils in speaking Latin and Greek and to teach formal grammar. it is not unlikely that the characters were modelled on the personifications of the De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii of Martianus Capella, which was still known during the Renaissance. This type of allegory had been a favourite device among medieval poets, and Martianus Capelia had had many medieval imitators in vernacular languages.

One of the last sets of this type of play was the dramatized version of the Ianua linguarum, published in 1664. The adaptation was made by D. Sebastianus Macer for the use of the school of Patakina, at which he had taught, and which was regarded, even by the master himself, as a model school. Though the book followed all the allegorical conventions of the Jesuit play, there were several important differences. First, the Cornenius plays were in prose, while the others had been in verse. Second. the exact classical format was not followed, the plays being of varying length and shape. But as the taste for allegory waned, so too did interest in this sort of play.

Classical drama formed an integral part of the Renaissance classics curriculum. In England several who founded grammar schools specified that a classical play should be performed every year; and on the continent, where Catholics were teaching in Protestant schools and vice versa, the religious climate excluded contemporary religious plays, so the classical repertoire was used exclusively. But medieval scruple hung on grimly, even into the eighteenth century.

In England especially, the custom of an annual performance of a classical play was still vigorously flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century, school editions being prepared with staging in mind. Owing to the activities of the great German classicists, the basic texts were now solidly established, but for school use they were carefully expurgated, a difficult task considering the exigencies of meter. Many editors normalized the preclassical spelling and even added stage directions. The place of such presentations was strengthened by the advent of the Direct Method, and they spread to the teaching of modern languages. Though it was considered most desirable to use plays written for native audiences, this means of instilling confidence was made available to younger pupils by providing them with plays in simplified language and style. As far as modern plays were concerned, teachers were inclined to choose those which reflected the culture of the country.

In modern schools and universities the modern-language play came to be a special show put on for the delectation of students’ parents and staff wives, but it also had the serious purpose of having pupils exercise their oral skills under some difficulty. In Russia, some schools encouraged the pupils to run puppet theatres in the foreign language, a natural outcome of the general interest in this art form.

Useful Language

Past tense is common.

Chronological order is also common, but when we are writing about past events, it is necessary to be explicit about the order in which things happened. To make the order clear, we mention dates and time, and we also use various links and connectives.

Time

In 1942,...

During the 20th century,...

Yesterday,...

Twenty five years ago,...

Sequence

Before

Before he was offered a job as a lecturer,

he had finished his research.

Before this, …

For the previous X years, …

Prior to this, …

Previously, …

X years previously, …

Before…

… before which …

… prior to which …

After

When As soon as After

he had finished his research, he was offered a job as a lecturer.

 

On finishing his research, After finishing his research, Having finished his research, On finishing his research,

he was offered a job as a lecturer.

For the following X years, …

X years later, …

After …

Following this, …

When …

Subsequently, …

Soon/Shortly/Immediately afterwards, …

… following which …

… after which …

While

While he was doing his research,		he made an important discovery.
When	doing his research,
While
During his research,

During this period, …

Throughout this period, …

… during which…

… throughout which…

3) Defining

In the following example, the term "lava" is being defined.

Lava is the name applied to the liquid rock material, or magma, when it reaches the surface, as well as to the solid rock formed by consolidation due to cooling. The temperature of lava as it comes to the surface may exceed 2000°F, for copper wire with a melting point of 2200°F was melted in the lava from Vesuvius, and at Kilauea a temperature of 2300°F. has been observed. This earth of ours by Victor T Allen, p. 3

Useful Language

X is...
X is called...
X is known as...
X may be defined as...
X is a type of Y that/which...
A type of Y which... is X

4) Classifying

The following example classifies, and also describes.

                                  The Classification of Species

The group species is the starting point for classification. Sometimes smaller groups, subspecies, are recognized, but these will not concern us until we discuss evolution. There are many larger groups: genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Let us begin with the first seven species. We belong to the genus Homo and to these more inclusive groups: (1) the family Hominidae, which includes, in addition to Homo, extinct men not of the genus Homo, and (2) the order Primates, which includes also the lemurs, monkeys and apes. The three cats - lion, house cat, and tiger - belong to the genus Fells. In general we can think of a genus as a group of closely related species. The three cats also belong to the family Felidae. Generally a family includes related genera. The first seven species, different enough to be put in three orders, are yet alike in many ways. All are covered with hair, they nurse their young with milk, and their red blood cells are without nuclei. Because of these and other resemblances they are combined in a still more inclusive group, Class Mammalia. A class, therefore, is composed of related orders.

Critical rhetorical function:

1) Comparing and contrasting: similarities and differences

The following paragraph pattern is one in which several things are compared or contrasted.

A one-million-fold increase in speed characterizes the development of machine computation over the past thirty years. The increase results from improvements in computer hardware. In the 1940s ENIAC, an early electronic computer, filled a room with its banks of vacuum tubes and miles of wiring. Today one can hold in the hand a computing device costing about $200 that is twenty times faster than ENIAC, has more components and a larger memory, is thousands of times more reliable, costs 1/10,000 the price, and consumes the power of a light bulb rather than that of a locomotive.

2)     Expressing reasons and explanations / cause and effect

In this type of pattern, the purpose is to explain cause and effect.

One of the most important properties of a liquid is that its surface behaves like an elastic covering that is continually trying to decrease its area. A result of this tendency for the surface to contract is the formation of liquids into droplets as spherical as possible considering the constraint of the ever-present gravity force. Surface tension arises because the elastic attractive forces between molecules inside a liquid are symmetrical; molecules situated near the surface are attracted from the inside but not the outside. The surface molecules experience a net inward force; and consequently, moving a surface molecule out of the surface requires energy.

3) Working with different voices and finding your own

The following paragraphs give arguments for and against.

One of the first men to make a commercial success of food conservation was Henry John Heinz. He started by bottling horseradish, and he was so successful that in 1869 he founded a company in Pittsburgh, USA. Like other Americans of his generation, Heinz made his name a household word throughout the western world. At last, man seems to have discovered how to preserve food without considerably altering its taste. The tins of food (Heinz tins!) which Captain Scott abandoned in the Antarctic were opened 47 years after his death, and the contents were not only edible, but pleasant.

The main argument against conserved foods is not that the canning of food makes it taste different; rather, people complain that the recipes which the canning chefs dream up are tedious or tasteless when it is eaten in great quantities. And a company like Heinz can only produce something if it is going to be eaten in great quantities. The tomato is very pleasant to eat when it is freshly picked. A regular diet of tomatoes alone could well prove tedious. The canning companies try to cook the tomato in as many ways as possible. The Heinz factories in Britain use millions and millions of tomatoes every year. They claim that if all the tomatoes were loaded on to 15-ton lorries, the line of lorries would stretch for 60 miles.

But there are many people who do not like to eat food out of season. They like their food to be fresh, and they like to cook it themselves in "the old-fashioned way". But it is very difficult for modern man to realise what it is like to live without the advantages of pre-packageded and canned food. European society in its present form could not cope without modern methods of food processing. Imagine your local supermarket without all the cans of pre-packaged foods. There wouldn't be much variety left, and what was left would have to be increased enormously in order to give the same amount of food. The supermarket would turn into a chaos of rotting vegetables, stale bread and unhealthy meat. The health problems would be insurmountable, unless we all went into the country to support ourselves.

So next time you reject canned food as being tasteless or unimaginative, remember that you can only afford to eat fresh food because canned food exists.

4)  Introducing

The purpose of the introduction is to show your reader what you are doing in your writing. It is also helpful to explain why you are doing it and how you are doing it.

In many parts of your writing - but especially in introductions - you may need to provide background information and introduce new concepts or ideas and provide a description of how you are going to proceed in the rest of your writing.

In the following text, after giving some background information to justify the research, sentence 10 introduces the rest of the report:

 

Use Of A Writing Web-Site By Pre-Masters Students On An English for Academic Purposes Course. A. J. Gillett, University of Hertfordshire Introduction 1During the past 10 years, the availability of computers in educational institutions has increased dramatically (James, 1999). 2Progress in computer development has been made to the point that powerful, inexpensive computers with large capacities are available in many classrooms and libraries for student use. 3Many students also have purchased and are purchasing computers for their own use at home. 4Most studies seem to agree that the microcomputer will continue to hold an important role in education in the future. 5For example, James (1999) and Smith (2000) suggest large increases in the numbers of computers both in educational institutions and the home in the near future. 6As far as education is concerned, Shaw (2001) identified three main uses of computers: the object of a course, an administrative tool, and a means of providing instruction. 7Fish and Cheam (2002) cite four uses of computers as a means of providing instruction: exercise, tutorial, simulation and problem solving. 8A wide range of computer programmes are now therefore available in all these areas for individual and classroom use. 9However, even though many studies have reported an increased use of computers in education, there has been very little research reported on the effectiveness of such use. 10The purpose of the present study is therefore to ascertain the effectiveness of using computer-assisted instruction as compared to traditional classroom instruction in an EAP writing class.

Useful phrases are:

· The purpose of this paper is to...

· The purpose of this investigation is to...

· The aim of this paper is to...

· This paper reports on the results obtained....

· This study was designed to...

· In this paper, we give results of...

· In this paper, we argue that....

· This paper argues that....

· We have organise the rest of this paper in the following way....

· This paper is structured as follows....

· The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections....

Exercise 1 “Classifying / categorizing”

Read the following texts and complete the tree diagram with the words given below:

Anthropology We shall outline the four major subfields of anthropology that have emerged in the twentieth century: physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and cultural anthropology. Physical anthropology deals with human biology across space and time. It is divided into two areas: paleontology, the study of the fossil evidence of the primate (including human) evolution, and neontology, the comparative biology of living primates, including population and molecular genetics, body shapes (morphology), and the extent to which behavior is biologically programmed. Archeology is the systematic retrieval and analysis of the physical remains left behind by human beings, including both their skeletal and cultural remains. Both the classical civilizations and prehistoric groups, including our prehuman ancestors, are investigated. Linguistics is the study of language across space and time. Historical linguistics attempts to trace the tree of linguistic evolution and to reconstruct ancestral language forms. Comparative (or structural) linguistics attempts to describe formally the basic elements of languages and the rules by which they are ordered into intelligible speech. Cultural anthropology includes many different perspectives and specialized subdisciplines but is concerned primarily with describing the forms of social organization and the cultural systems of human groups. In technical usage, ethnography is the description of the social and cultural systems of one particular group, whereas ethnology is the comparison of such descriptions for the purpose of generalizing about the nature of all human groups. (From D.E. Hunt and P. Whitten: T he Study of Anthropology (Harper and Row, 1976)

• ethnology
• linguistics
• archeology
• cultural anthropology
• structural linguistics
• linguistics
• physical anthropology
• paleontology
• neontology
• ethnography
• anthropology

Начало формы

Конец формы

Exercise 2 “Taking a stance”

Read the following text and identify words that show the author's position:

Communication is probably one of the most important of all human behaviours. Our use of language may be private - we can think to ourselves in words or write diaries that are meant to be seen by no one but ourselves - but language certainly evolved through social contacts among our early ancestors. Speaking and writing are clearly social behaviours: we learn these skills from other people and use them to communicate with them. An effective language system also tends to abide by certain rules. Although an exact definition is difficult to pin down, language can be characterised as a system of visual and/or vocal symbols which have meaning to the user and to the recipient. There are thought to be around 6000 distinct languages in the world. The world's largest language is said to be Chinese - it has more native speakers than any other - followed closely by English, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish and Arabic. The most popular foreign language is usually claimed (Smith, 2003) to be English.

MODULE 2 TAKING NOTES

Taking notes is an important part of the life of every student. There are two main reasons why note-taking is important:

1. When you are reading or listening, taking notes helps you concentrate. In order to take notes - to write something sensible - you must understand the text. As listening and reading are interactive tasks, taking notes help you make sense of the text. Taking notes does not mean writing down every word you hear; you need to actively decide what is important and how is related to what you have already written.

2. Notes help you to maintain a permanent record of what you have read or listened to.

Good notes should be accurate, clear and concise. They should show the organisation of the text, and this should show the relationship between the ideas.

How to take notes

When you're reading, first survey the text to find the main points and how they are related. Then read for the subsidiary points; see how they are related to the main points and to each other. Then, reduce the points to notes. Make sure links and relationships between the ideas are shown.

Good notes need to be organised appropriately. There are two main methods for this:

List

The topic is summarised one point after another, using numbers and letters and indentation to organise information in order of importance. The numbers and letters can be used by themselves or in combination.

I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I,

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8, 9, 10,

(i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x),

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i,

Or using decimals:

1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Read the following text and study the example below:

Oils

There are three main groups of oils: animal, vegetable and mineral. Great quantities of animal oil come from whales, those enormous creatures of the sea which are the largest remaining animals in the world. To protect the whale from the cold of the Arctic seas, nature has provided it with a thick covering of fat called blubber. When the whale is killed, the blubber is stripped off and boiled down, either on board ship or on shore. It produces a great quantity of oil which can be made into food for human consumption. A few other creatures yield oil, but none so much as the whale. The livers of the cod and the halibut, two kinds of fish, yield nourishing oil. Both cod liver oil and halibut liver oil are given to sick children and other invalids who need certain vitamins. These oils may be bought at any chemist's.

Vegetable oil has been known from antiquity. No household can get on without it, for it is used in cooking. Perfumes may be made from the oils of certain flowers. Soaps are made from vegetable and animal oils.

To the ordinary man, one kind of oil may be as important as another. But when the politician or the engineer refers to oil, he almost always means mineral oil, the oil that drives tanks, aeroplanes and warships, motor-cars and diesel locomotives; the oil that is used to lubricate all kinds of machinery. This is the oil that has changed the life of the common man. When it is refined into petrol it is used to drive the internal combustion engine. To it we owe the existence of the motorcar, which has replaced the private carriage drawn by the horse. To it we owe the possibility of flying. It has changed the methods of warfare on land and sea. This kind of oil comes out of the earth. Because it burns well, it is used as fuel and in some ways it is superior to coal in this respect. Many big ships now burn oil instead of coal. Because it burns brightly, it is used for illumination; countless homes are still illuminated with oil-burning lamps. Because it is very slippery, it is used for lubrication. Two metal surfaces rubbing together cause friction and heat; but if they are separated by a thin film of oil, the friction and heat are reduced. No machine would work for long if it were not properly lubricated. The oil used for this purpose must be of the correct thickness; if it is too thin it will not give sufficient lubrication, and if it is too thick it will not reach all parts that must be lubricated.

(From Power and Progress by G. C. Thornley (Longman))

Notes

Oils