TOPIC 6. WRITTEN COMMUNICATION. DIFFERENT TYPES OF WRITTEN TEXTS.

STRUCTURE AND FORMAL ELEMENTS. NORMAL RULING WRIITTEN TEXTS.

ROUTINES AND FORMULAE

1. INTRODUCTION

Written communication involves the ability to effectively convey multiple types

of messages, in multiple forms, to varying audiences, through a written medium.

Young learners begin to develop their communication skills in oral contexts, but
as they progress in their life, writing skills become increasingly important, shifting in
emphasis from the development of fundamental print literacy and transcription skills
(dictation), to composing narratives about one’s experiences, to expository analyses
of phenomena, and ultimately to more sophisticated tasks, such as writing arguments
or research reports.

In English Language Teaching (ELT), the legal frameworks that develop the
content teachers need to teach at Secondary and Bachillerato levels namely, Royal
Decree 217/2020 29 March and Royal Decree 243/2020 5 April at national level and
Decrees 65/2020 and 64/2020 20 July at regional level, contain a specific competence,
number two, which encourages students to produce texts, therefore a specific
competence dealing with the topic at hand.

The ability to write effectively using standard written English is particularly

important in higher education. Students of these academic levels are used to deal with
written communication since Primary School, mainly with simple, well-structures
written language; however, it is particularly crucial at this stage that teachers take
advantage of the students’ higher level of cognitive development to enhance students’
writing skills and introduce more demanding written text types such as argumentation
or exposition.

2. WRITTEN VERSUS ORAL COMMUNICATION

One important difference between oral and written language is the amount of
time and space available for communication. Oral language and written language are
also different in the type of demand that they make on listeners and readers. Oral
language allows the negotiation of meaning to ensure effective communication. Written

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language must rely on the text to create the context of situation where the correct
meaning can be interpreted.

Oral language is a complex or “grammatically intricate” as written language. In

fact, contains more main clauses, although most of them are chained together in an
additive fashion. Written language consists of clauses that are internally complex, i.e.
subordinate clauses indicating place, manner, time, instrument…

Oral language and written language also differ in lexical density. Written texts
contain more content words (nouns and verbs) than oral texts, so they are lexically
denser.

Attending to syntactic and lexical features, written language has the following
characteristics:

SYNTACTIC FEATURES

• The use of markers that indicate the relationship between clauses: ‘that’
complementizers; temporal markers (when/while); logical connectors (besides,
moreover, however, in spite of, whereas, etc.)

• Rhetorical organizers which order the logical sequence of events or

explanations due to the lack of negotiation between author and reader.

• Pre-modification of Noun Phrases (NP)

• Order of the sentence: SVO

• Passive constructions

• Profusion of subordinated clause.

• Syntactic structures such as cleft-sentences.

• It-cleft: “It’s money that they need”.

• Wh-cleft: “What they need is money”

• Typographical devices such as italics, underlining or bold fonts.

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LEXICAL FEATURES

Lexically dense; more content words: nouns and verbs. Use of wide range of
lexical items to avoid redundancy. Higher use of nominalized forms: form a N from a V
or Adj, e.g. ‘output’ and ‘truth’ from ‘out’, ‘put’ and ‘true’.

3. TYPES OF TEXT: GENRES AND ELEMENTS

Because there are different ways of conveying meaning, there are different
genres with their own elements and features that convey that meaning. A text that
gives a written account of, for instance, the life of an English queen does not have the
same structure that, say, one that argues about whether or not she did a good job as
a ruler of the country.

There are five traditional genres, namely: narrative, descriptive, expository,

procedural and argumentative which have following main features:

Narrative texts

In the more narrow and specific sense, a narrative is the telling or the recounting
of real or invented events. The skeleton of a narrative consists of a series of temporally
ordered clauses. There are five basic elements that are needed to develop a narrative:
theme, plot, narrator, characters and setting.

Broadly speaking, the structure of narrative texts contains a beginning, a middle,

and an end, but when studying narratives in detail they have all or some of the following
elements:

1. Abstract: one or two sentences summarizing the whole story, e.g., a title.

2. Orientation: a paragraph giving elemental information about the time, place,

characters, their activity or the situation, in other words, it presents the reader
the whole story.

3. Complicating actions: sequential clauses describing the different events.

4. Evaluation: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative.
The evaluation section is typical of personal experiences.

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 5. Resolution: the set of complicating actions that follows or coincides with the
most reportable events.

6. Coda: a free clause at the end which signals that the narrative is finished.

Not all narratives contain all six elements, their basic characteristics being their
temporal sequence, which is an important defining property proceeding from its
referential function.

The structure of narrative texts is accompanied by linguistic features that make

us distinguish between narratives and other kind of texts. These are the most important
morpho-syntactic features to be considered when dealing with narratives: use of action
verbs in past tenses or historic present to focus on a specific point of the story; linking
words to do with time (when, while, as soon as, etc.), specific nouns, avoidance of
hypernym, e.g., oak instead of tree; descriptive language; direct and indirect speech.
Careful use of adjectives and adverbs (description) and imagery, i.e. profuse use of
rhetorical devices such as metaphors, similes, personifications, etc. which help the
author to embellish the text, strongly linked to Jakobson’s poetic function language.

Descriptive texts

A broad definition of descriptive texts would be one which includes not only their
main feature, that is to say, texts that provide a mental picture of a scene, person,
thing, situation, et cetera, but also it has to include the fact that although it is a text type
in its own rights, it is also a text withing a text, an accessory that is usually embedded
withing narratives and, as an accessory it can be easily deleted without altering the
meaning of the text to which is subordinated.

Descriptive texts involve the presentation of objects/animate agents in space.

The descriptive of text types involves narrative pauses, text that is used to slow the
pace of a narrative. It involves depicting “realities”; realities can be real or made up
(fictions) through either the sense (sensory information) or through the filter of one’s
own subjectivity. Descriptions frozen time and are linked to photography as narrations
to motion-pictures and exposition to documentaries. When descriptions appear in
narratives it is the background of the story, it does not only describe the spatial setting
but also the characterization of roles which can be external, i.e., physical description

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or/and internal (psychological). This means that the communicative functions
performed, following Jakobson’s model, by a narrative which includes narrative and
description, being the descriptive part an external description, is the referential
function, whereas if the characterization is internal, the function is expressive or
emotive.

The typical grammar features associated with description would be the use of
stative verbs, i.e. verbs that do not denote action, and copular verbs such as ‘be’,
‘become’, ‘resemble’, ‘look’, et cetera.

Also prototypical of description is the use of existential verbs, i.e., verbs that can
be used with existential ‘there’, e.g., ‘there are’, ‘there existed’, ‘there will occur’, etc.;
demonstratives; profuse use of adjectives, either factual (adjectives that describe
something in an objective way, giving information about attributes which can be agreed
upon) or evaluative (adjectives that describe something subjectively, e.g. ‘pretty’,
‘nice’, ‘boring’, etc.) and epithets. Relative clauses (both types, defining and non-
defining) are more complex grammatical devices to convey descriptive meaning.

Expository texts

Expository texts is a type of informational text that provides factual information

about a topic using a clear, non-narrative, organizational structure with a major topic
and supporting information.

Expository texts can include topics such as historical, scientific or economic

information. The information is presented with a clear organizational text structure
which includes but is not limited to: description, chronology, comparison, cause/effect,
problem/solution.

The language in exposition is precise, specific to the subject and includes

domain specific vocabulary to explain concepts and information.

The main textual features in expository texts are given by textual and lexical
items, that is, textual devices which are words used to enhance the effectiveness of
the exposition, these textual devices, among many others, are: use of present (simple)
tense; action verbs to explain cause, connectors, use of references as anaphora and
cataphora, passive voice, etc.

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 Expository texts are strongly linked to documentaries so the different types of
expository texts can be distinguished on two main prameters: the audience and the
author’s purpose.

Procedural texts

The purpose of a procedure is to tell the reader how to do or make something.

The information is presented in a logical sequence of events, which is broken up into
small sequenced steps. The most common example of a procedural text is a recipe.

Texts that instruct how to do a particular activity are recipes, rules of games,
science experiments, road safety rules or “how to do it” manuals.

A procedure usually has four components: goal or aim, states what is to be

done; materials, ingredients or equipment, listed in order; steps; evaluation or
conclusion, how the success of the procedure can be tested.

Argumentative texts

Argumentative texts are the kind of texts that seek the acceptance or the
adherence of an audience or to reinforce the assent of the public when the
speaker/writer already has the support of the audience. For maximum impact and
effectiveness, theses need to be presented in a convincing way with examples,
comparisons, analogies, etc. that are relatable.

Argumentation is an appeal to reason and rationality; it needs to draw on

common grounds of shared knowledge, i.e., something which is intelligible and
understandable by the audience. For instance, a common ground in the case of
publicity is “you’re not happy with what you have”; political speech, for its part, plays
with the common ground of telling voters that everything that has been achieved will
disappear if they (politicians) are removed from office/power, whereas the [political]
opposition will turn that message upside down, e.g., “They have managed your
interests and this new situation is what you’ll get if you change the government”, so, it
is always based on shared knowledge between addressers and addressees.

The structure of argumentation is very well settled and are essential for the
development of a coherent argumentative text. On the one hand, there is a high

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incidence of evaluative words and phrases (subjectivity) in opposition to expository
texts in which facts are found (objectivity), examples of evaluative words are opinion
verbs such as ‘affirm’, ‘argue’, ‘claim’, ‘consider’, ‘deny’ or ‘present’; agreement and
refutation verbs such as ‘agree’, ‘oppose’, ‘prefer’, ‘differ’ or ‘disagree’.

Connectors play an essential role as well, they reflect the cohesion needed to
show a logical development of the argument; connectors in argumentation are of the
following types: summative, restrictive, opposition, insistence, explanatory, previous
reference and conclusive. In order to justify the author’s positions, conditional
sentences are often used, for instance, to show a general true (zero and first
conditional sentences) or unreal present/past events (second and third conditionals).

Other grammatical categories that are commonly used in argumentation are

adjectives which may qualify or neuter the author’s point of view, e.g. relevant research
– real data; abstract nouns to expose ideas, facts or anecdotes and concrete nouns
for technical definitions; adverbs that enable the speaker/writer to create the desired
effect on the audience, e.g., ‘clearly’, ‘briefly’.

In argumentation, a balance between analysis and synthesis is required;

analysis deconstructs arguments and ideas whereas synthesis is integrated in the text
in order to make conclusions. Regarding register, argumentative texts tend to be more
formal, unless, for instance, an opinion article conveyed in a lively manner.

4. CONCLUSIONS AND TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

From an educational perspective, developing written skills will enable students

to learn how to compose ideas, organize their thoughts and arguments, support key
points and share information. Acquiring these skills will also prepare students for their
academic future and professional endeavours.

Learning to write is a key aspect of everyday life. Writing facilities reflection,

expression and enables individuals to compose their thoughts, therefore providing us
with the framework for one of the most prominent methods of daily communication. In
an electronic world where verbal communication has become less frequently used,
learning to write in a cohesive, structured manner allows individuals to convey their
thoughts effectively.

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 Writing provides us with catharsis and a sense of accomplishment. Completing
and feeling good about a piece of writing that a student has worked on promotes
confidence and this is an essential element to personal productivity in all facets of
education. When a student sees a piece of work that they have successfully
completed, this leads to positive emotions. We work best when we are happy and feel
positive about our achievements. This leads us to continue on a path of success.

The transition from high school to post-secondary education and beyond.

Possessing proficient written skills is an essential aspect of education, as students
must prepare for the transition from high school to post-secondary education, as well
as beyond this, for example, through employment, where possessing written skills is
crucial.

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Alba-Juez, Laura. Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009

- Alba-Juez, Laura. Pragmatics: Cognition, Context and Culture. McGraw Hill. 2016

- Chacón, Rubén Manuel. Sociolinguistics. UNED. 2015

- De Beaugrande, Robert-Alain, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. Introduction to text

linguistics. London: longman. 1981