Page 88 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 77

active verbal form (but with an inanimate agent-noun): ‘Communication at all
levels … has required’ (rather than ‘communication at all levels required me to
…’, or ‘I responded to the demands of communication by …’, or even ‘when I was
required to … I responded’).
When I saw this text some years ago (it comes from an academic institution in
Australia, circa 1988) I felt that it showed the power of language, of bureaucratic
discourse, that is, the world organised and represented through the lens of the
bureaucratic institution. I thought that the applicant felt constrained to replicate
the language of the institution and to fit herself to it. When I look at this text now
– through my now somewhat changed lens of a view of grammar as a resource
for new meanings that I outlined earlier – I still see the power of the linguistic
resources, of the discourse, and of the institution, but I also see the attempt by the
‘applicant’ to show herself as somewhat, somehow, distinct from the
institutional forms, as speaking in her own way, through the use she makes of the
resources of the language. She has changed the heavily nominalised language of
the original (which had been sent out with the further particulars) into a direction
where she can appear, however faintly, in the way I have outlined.
In this text I now think there is both the power of the language and of the
institution from which it comes. Of course, this applies not only to this
institution: it has allowed itself to move into a discourse of this kind, no doubt
because it was seen at the time as good management, as good ‘human resources’
practice. At the same time there is the power of the individual to transform the
resources in the direction of her own interests, a power of which she avails
herself. These interests, as always, include a complex of issues, and after all if
one wants the job that one is applying for, it includes an attempt to present
oneself as though one already has the shape that fits in with the purposes of the
institution. This job application seems to be saying: ‘I am (already) the position
you are seeking to fill’.

Sentence, texts and the social environment

The major resource which the job applicant draws on is that of transformation of
elements of sentences. Now I will discuss the sentence, from two perspectives:
its constitution as the result of textual processes which combine clauses; and in
terms of the social production of the sentence, a question of its ‘origins’. The
examples both come from the seventeenth century, a time when English had been
the written language of formal public life for not much more than a century –
whether at the court, in the judiciary, in commerce, in public administration, in
some areas of intellectual life or, for that matter, in literary prose. My reason for
choosing examples from that period is that it is still possible to see, in writing
from that time, the social–cultural making of writing as a mode. A hundred or a
hundred and fifty years before then English was used in writing – the Paston
letters, written by members of an important aristocratic East Anglian family to