English language Language and Writing
Bayan Al Momani
Language is a coin when flipped its two faces are speech and writing, still it’s the same coin. Reading the history of language shows the dominance of speech, whereas writing has its own point of keeping a record for the development of language. The main issue is there are many writers, but what makes them all different from each other is the keyword here, because none of them is alike. If a writer has style it means that it is appreciated by his or her readers, but again all writers have style which can be considered positive or negative. Writers' style is usually checked by critics and audience of readers by underlining how did the writers conserve the grammatical side of language, and his or her way of creating a style of their own that they would be labelled accordingly. Does style mean mastering the unity of the script and therefore it can be acknowledged as artistic unity? Style in my opinion does not mean at all that writers reached that stage of perfection or all of them are masters in the writing field. Language is a system that can be expressed in many ways- by the marks on paper that we call writing. However, the signs of language- its words and morphemes- are basically oral-aural, sounds produced by the mouth and received by the ear. If human communication had developed primarily as a system of gestures, it would have been quite different from what it is. Speech is undoubtedly superior, as its evolutionary survival demonstrates.1 When it comes to writing and speech, things are debatable since writing has become so important, we sometimes think of it as more real than speech. Speech is primary and writing secondary to language, we all learn to talk well before we learn to write. If speaking makes us human, writing makes us civilized. Writing has some advantages over speech. Writing is more permanent, and is also capable of easily making some distinctions that speech can make only with difficulty. 2
Thomas pyles, John Algeo. The Origins and Developmant of the English Language. Harcourt Brace Jovanvich, Publishers. P. 9 .1
The Origins and Development of the English Language. P. 9-10 .2
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An important aspect of language systems is that they are "open." That is a language is not a finite set of messages from which the speaker must choose. Instead, any speaker can use the resources of language- its vocabulary and grammatical patterns- to make up new messages, sentences that no one has ever said before. Because a language is an open system, it can always be used to talk about new things. Another aspect of the communicative function of language is that it can be displaced. The characteristic of displacement means that human beings can abstract, can lie, and can talk about talk itself. It allows us to use language as a vehicle of memory and imagination.3 When it comes to writing as the other face of language, there are many things to consider. The greatest benefit of learning to write is developing as a human being. Writing forces us to explore and thereby to enlarge our capacity to think and feel and perceive. Expressing ourselves on papers make us more complex and interesting individuals, more deeply aware of ourselves and of the world around us. When we write we do a number of things almost simultaneously: arrange ideas think about the reader, select words, form them into phrases and clauses and these in turn into sentences, shape the sentences into paragraphs, and link the paragraphs to form larger units.4 Writing is not merely a process of thinking of something to say and then selecting or looking up the words needed to say it. Writing is more complicated, its complexity is revealed by the ambiguity of the word itself. On the one hand, "writing" means the total activity of producing a composition; on the other, the physical act of forming letters. As a process, writing involves both mental and physical activity. The struggle to translate that idea into marks on paper pushes us in unexpected directions. Thus "writing" in the abstract sense both feeds and is fed by "writing" in the physical sense. This struggle can lead to a kind of confusion between effectiveness and correctness. The first means that a piece of writing achieves its purpose; the second that it is written according to rules of grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation. To write effectively requires more than observing conventions of grammar and usage and punctuation. Observing rules does not in itself make prose good; but carelessly disregarding them seriously reduces the effectiveness of otherwise good writing. 5
same source. P. 22 .3
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Thomas S. kane, The Oxford Guide to Writing. A Rhetoric and Handbook for College Students. Oxford University Press. Introduction .4
The Oxford Guide to Writing. P. 4-5 .5
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Language define writers through their style if it is proper to say so, I can assume that language shows the individual differences between writers. At school teachers know their students and can give through observation definite information about them. We as readers can sense the name of the writer from the language he uses, that is his ability to make his words and ideas as one unit. I still think that there is difference between style and artistic unity, if the writer has style does not mean at all that he excelled in using language tools efficiently. This is one reason for having some books as masterpieces in literature, and others as good books. Style means the total of all the choices a writer makes in his or her words and their arrangements. In this sense style may be good or bad- good if the choices are appropriate to the writer's purpose, bad if they are not. Style has a positive, approving sense, as when we say that someone has "style" or praise a writer for his or her "style." In a narrow sense the word may also designate a particular way of writing, unique to a person or characteristic of a group or profession: "Hemingway's style," "academic style."6 What defines a writer is her or his ideas, and how he explores his ideas and the ways he looks for to develop his ideas. Unity in writing involves two related by distinct aspects: Coherence and Flow. Coherence means that the ideas fit together. Flow means that the sentences link together so that readers are not conscious of gaps. Flow is a matter of style and appears in the surface of prose, in specific words and grammatical patterns which tie on sentence to another. Coherence belongs to the substructure of the paragraph, to the relationships of thought, feeling, and perception expressed by the words. So to be coherent in writing, what you write must satisfy several criteria: relevance, effective order and inclusiveness. And to be relevant you do not wander from the topic. When you write a topic sentence, you make a promise, and what you write should accord with the promise.7 There are features that are in favor of writing, which make language a reflection of a writer's aspirations and his entity as a free human being. The development of writing freed us from the limitations of time and geography, but spoken language has primacy. The written language reflects, to a certain extent, the elements and rules that together constitute the grammar of the language. The written language is more conservative than the spoken
The Oxford Guide to Writing. P. 13-4 .6
same source. P. 112 .7
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language; writing represents the spoken language perfectly. Writing permits a society to permanently record its poetry, its history, and its technology. 8 Learning how to communicate in writing through reading comprehension is considered as a functional approach. In fact what one is about to read is written in the first place, and one just need to do the same after learning through reading. And that is clearly obvious from the introduction of a book about writing. Why is so much reading practice given in a book on writing? Simply because if you wish to organize your essays correctly, it is important to understand how other writers have organized their passages. Answering questions like 'How is this passage organized?' and 'In what other ways could the writer have organized it?' is a useful step towards improving your own writing.9 One of the main features that show the writer's skill in writing is his or her ability to refer back to something already mentioned and the same time say something new. They give new information. Also when he or she supports a statement, one use of the word 'indeed' is to introduce a sentence which supports a statement that has just been made. Another thing the need to add summarizing sentences, when we write, it often helps the reader if we include some sentences which summarize what we are about to say, or what we have just said, or both. How can a writer make many types of descriptive statements. The writer should know how to describe types of the issue he or she is writing about, its effects, and solutions to the problem, in that order. What terms the writer is to use that he or she wishes to clarify something the writer has said, how it can be said in other way. When it is about describing a process, we sometimes wish to say not only what happens, but also what we predicted would happen. The writer writes his subject describing causes, effects, reasons and results, and the reader should be able to underline causes, effects, reasons and results. 10 These points are only examples of how to write, but do they make us professional writers? No, they simply don't, they are ways to communicate using writing as a tool. They help us to put our ideas and thoughts on paper using these writing methods. We can function as writers to be, and the readers can judge our writings and define us as writers or not, and at the same time readers inadvertently work as critics if they find our work worth discussing. The key is to write but basically to think of a controversial topic to be associated with the .Fromkin, Victoria. An Introduction to Language. Holt- Saunders International Editions. P. 141, 154-5-6 .8
keith Jonson, Communicate in Writing. Longman. P. 2 .9
.keith Johnson, communicate in writing .10
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subject. Ideas make the subject worth reading or not, ideas make writers different from each other, and the kind of language they use to communicate these ideas.
Books of literature specify the elements for writing a novel, a short story and so on; one of these elements is the artistic unity, which I think is the other word for style, but at the same time shows the artistic style of combining the skills of writing with his or her writing skills and that makes it also different. Artistic unity is essential to a good plot. There must be nothing in the story that is irrelevant. Good writers exercise rigorous selection: they include nothing that does not advance the central intention of the story. But they must not only select; they must also arrange. The incidents and episodes should be placed in the most effective order, which is not necessarily the chronological order, and when rearranged in chronological order, should take a logical progression. In a highly unified story each event grows out of the preceding one in time and leads logically to the next. The various stages of the story are linked together in a chain of cause and effect. 11 An author who gives his story a turn unjustified by the situation or the characters involved is guilty of Plot Manipulation. Any unmotivated action furnishes an instance of plot manipulation. We suspect authors of plot manipulation also if they rely too heavily on chance or coincidence to bring about a solution to a story. Chance cannot be barred from fiction, of course, any more than it can be barred from life. But, if an author uses an improbable chance to effect a resolution to a story, the story loses its sense of conviction and inevitability. The objections to such use of coincidence are even more forcible, for coincidence is chance compounded. Coincidence may be justifiably used to initiate a story, and occasionally to complicate it, but not to resolve it. It is often said that fact is strange than fiction: it should be stranger than fiction. In life almost any concatenation of events is possible; in story the sequence of events should be probable. 12 So to go back to the main point that deals with writing, which is language. Language is often defined according to its purpose; language is a system of signs by means of which human beings communicate. Essentially these signs are vocal. The most important word is Laurence Perrine. Literature Structure, Sound and Sense. 4th edition . Harcourt Brace Jovanvich, Publishers. p. 47 .11
literature Structure. P. 47-8 .12
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system. A language is not just a collection of words, such as we find in a dictionary. It is also the rules or patterns that relate the words to one another. Every language has two levels to its system- a characteristic that is called duality of patterning. One of these levels consists of meaningful units, the words and word parts in the sentence. The other level consists of units that have no meaning in themselves, although they serve as components of the meaningful units. The distinction between a meaningful word and its meaningless parts is important. Without that distinction, language as we know it would be impossible.13 Duality of patterning lets people build an immensely large number of meaningful words out only of a handful of meaningless sounds. The meaningless components of a language make up its sound system, or phonology. The meaningful units are part of its grammatical system. Both have patterning. The sounds of a language recur again and again according to a well-defined system, for without system, communication would be impossible. The same is true of all linguistic features, not only sound alone. The grammatical system of any language has various techniques for relating words to one another and for signaling the structure of the sentences that words make up. Every language must have its own system. The systems are, of course, different, but no system can be said superior to another.14 In October 2002, the Analytical section of the GRE became the Analytical Writing section. The Analytical Writing section is divided into two parts: one part is entitled "Present Your Perspective on an issue," and the other one is entitled "Analyze an Argument." This is a way to measure writing ability.
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Isn't it what writers usually do, that they have something to
present combined with their analytical point of view of the issue. And that critics and readers are the tool to show those writers what they think of their work and did they pass the test. The point is writing can be sometimes "writing for survival," but in the case of writers, writing is for doing and presenting their ability to write using grammatical rules efficiently. The point is that Language is a system with a purpose, which is to communicate either through speech or writing. We all learn language that is to speak and to express ourselves, and then through writing. Writing can be for survival like in tests where one is being tested for having strong organizational, structural, and grammatical skills. Also to test one's ability to convey ideas in written English, and whether they are clear and in the correct order. .Thomas S. kane, The Oxford Guide to Writing. P. 3-4 .13
.The Oxford Guide to Writing. P. 4,7 .14
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.Cracking the GRE. The Princeton Review. 2009 Edition .15
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Professional writers are the same; they are being tested for all these things by their audience. One thing is different they use language to make their own kind of language, and that makes each one of them different or copies. That is style, and the artistic unity that mark and label each writer, his or her ability to make a style of their own by the kind of language he or she uses. This kind of language defines its user and classifies him or her; they are like teachers with individual differences ranging from outstanding to normal, classy to outrageous and when they present their work to the public they are students waiting for their work to be marked by their teachers, the audience. Each writer has a style of his or her own and that does not mean that all of them have acquired the artistic unity of the script.
References:
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman. An Introduction to Language. Third
Edition. Holt-Saunders International Editions. Johnson, Keith. Communicate in Writing. Longman. Kane, Thomas S. The Oxford Guide To Writing, A Rhetoric and Handbook
for College Students. Oxford University Press. Pyles, Thomas, John Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English
Language. Harcourt Brace Jovanvich, Publishers. Princeton Review. Cracking the GRE. 2009 Edition.