lunedì 20 aprile 2009

Readable, clear, concise, interesting, simple...what else??

Writing is a hard task, if you wanna do it in a proper way. It's not just a matter of putting on a piece of paper your thoughts, you have to organize your ideas and put them in a logical order, otherwise your reader isn't going to understand anything. This is true not only if you're writing an academic paper, but also if you're writing a blog post. 

An example of a well-written paper is the article I found, which is called "Motivation and Second Language Acquisition", by R.C. Gardner, University of Western Ontario. I have to point out I changed the article 'coz the previous one is not available online any more. Don't worry, this article is even more interesting than the other one. As you can easily get from the title of this new article, Gardner talks about the role of motivation in second language acquisition, distinguishing two types of motivations, language learning motivation and classroom motivation. 

Generally speaking, Gardner is really clear in the whole article. He provides many schemes of what he's explaining and he often points out what he's gonna say and demonstrate. For example, at the beginning of his article he says: "In this vein, I intend to direct my attention to the following four points:
a. Two motivational constructs
b. Stages of language acquisition
c. Cultural and educational contexts
d. Results from Spain". 
By reading this scheme, the reader is ready from the very beginning to follow Gardner's flow of ideas, which is really logical. In fact, there is an intro, a body and a conclusion. The intro is the abstract, which briefly explains what the research consists of and the conclusions it drew. The body consists of four brief paragraphs with a title each, and the conclusion is the last paragraph. This clear structure makes the article readable and easy to get. The reader is able to follow Gardner's discourse without getting lost in his thoughts. Moreover, Gardner uses a simple language and short sentences, which help the reader not to get bored. For example, when he has to explain what the initial stage in second language acquisition is, he simply says: "The initial stage is Elemental. In this stage the individual is learning the basics of the language, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciations, etc. (what Lambert would term the vocabulary cluster). We see this in the development of one’s first language when the toddler learns new words, begins to put words together, mispronounces some words but corrects them later, etc... With the second language student, we see the same process when initial vocabulary is learned, equivalents with the first language are recognized, simple declarative sentences are memorized,etc." As you can notice, the explanation is easy to understand, with no specific terms. The text is cohesive, too. For example, after analysing the four stages in language acquisition, Gardner says that "This analysis is not meant to be definitive as to the stages of language acquisition, but it does serve to highlight what is meant by “learning” the language, and to emphasize that it has different meanings at different stages of the learning process." The word "this" is pointing back to what he explains before. About the audience, I think this article is written for students 'coz, as I said before, it's really simple and readable.

Well, certainly our blog posts should be like this. I mean, of course a blog post has to be concise, but it should be cohesive, logical and clear as a well-written academic article. I think writing a good blog post isn't as easy as people think. On the contrary, it's more difficult to write a good blog post than a good article 'coz you have to say something interesting in few sentences, but you still have to pay attention to the structure of the text you're writing. A blog post has to have an intro, a body and a conclusion, too, just like an article, but it has to be more concise. This is not easy at all!

2 commenti:

  1. Hi Vale,
    sorry if I'm late with the feedback..as you know, I’ve been quite busy in these days!
    I perfectly know what you mean when you say that writing is a hard task, especially when we are requested to say some interesting in a simple and concise way! Reading your post I’ve noticed that you paid much attention to the structure of your text and I think that you did a very good job! I love the title of your post, it perfectly describes the aim of the task (and our despair in doing it!). It’s really difficult for me to find mistakes in your writing, because I feel I haven’t the right qualifications to do it and I’m not enough experienced in dealing with grammar rules; I also believe that sometimes I cannot see the mistakes my peers make mostly because they’re the same mistakes I do, and sometimes it can happen that I correct right sentences just because I’m convinced that they are wrong. This is a necessary apology since now I’m going to highlight the parts in which I see there’s something wrong.
    Well ,let’s start with the first sentence. Here you say “Writing is a hard task, if you wanna do it in a proper way”. I’m not that convinced of this construction, especially of the comma before if. Notice that “if” in this case doesn’t introduce an hypothesis but a consequence (in my opinion). I would put “ writing is a hard task, and it becomes even harder when you have to do it in a proper way” I would or simply add an “especially” after the comma ( Writing is a hard task, especially if you want to do it in a proper way).
    Then, here it comes one of the most burning issues , that is, the choice between simple future and the construction “to be going to”. You write: “otherwise your reader isn't going to understand anything.” Although Sarah told us to be careful with simple future, this doesn’t mean we have to eliminate it entirely from our vocabulary. The construction “to be going to” ,besides indicating that something is to happen in a short time, indicates volition too, and this is not your case. Use simple future, I think this is the best solution! Later in your post you write: which is called "Motivation and Second Language Acquisition”. I don’t know if you can say that an article is called something, I think it’s better to use the adjective “entitled” . Another solution is to change the word and sentence order: “"Motivation and Second Language Acquisition" is an example of well-written paper. This is an article by R.C. Gardner from the university of Western Ontario”. Ah, now I see, university always has the initial written in small letters.
    In the last paragraph you write: ”I mean, of course a blog post has to be concise, but it should be cohesive, logical and clear as a well-written academic article”. Here I think you should add the verb “is” after “academic article”. The last sentence I would change is this: A blog post has to have an intro, a body and a conclusion, too..” Here you can put the modal verb “should” instead of “has to have”, the sentence would be correct and would sound much more spontaneous.
    Hope I haven’t done too big a mess! I say it twice, I’m not sure whether what I wrote is correct or not. Please, if I wrote something wrong reply to this comment. I think that’s the simpler (and maybe the only one) way to improve our skills!
    See you in class,bye!
    Anna

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  2. Hi Anna, thanks for your feedback, I really appreciated you did it even if the deadline for it was last week. At the beginning I have to admit I was not sure that giving feedback to each other was a good idea, but now I feel it's extremely useful!
    First of all, I'm glad you noticed I pay attention to the structure of my posts, I really do! : )
    About your feedback, I just have to say I don't use "will" any more 'coz Sarah said us to do so. I used to using it a lot and sometimes I think it sounds really good in a sentence, but I avoid it as well just because of Sarah. Dunno if I'm wrong, I'm just trying not to disappoint her.
    The other thing I have to point out is the structure of my first sentence. You're right, I shouldn't have put the comma, but just 'coz "if" is a subordinator and doesn't require the comma. What's more, if you have the main clause followed by the subordinate clause, you shouldn't put it.
    That's all, thanks again for your corrections! : )

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