Page 92 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 81

Bible). In the extract (Figure 5.7) we can discern a lower-class English, the
speech of her parents perhaps: ‘my mother died nine years ago … I was trained
up to my book and writing’; the speech of the preacher: ‘my father and mother
living and dying in the profession of the Lord Jesus’, heavily influenced by the
Bible; and the speech of the religious community of which she had become a
member: ‘the last words she uttered on her death bed were these to the Lord for
her daughter’. What is clear is that diverse social domains and the forms of
speech of those domains are drawn on here. Anna Trapnell’s sentence is a device
for bringing such diversity into at least temporary conjunction. Out of such
temporary conjunction longer-term semiotic forms might then emerge – the
prose forms of Aphra Behn in the same century, or those of Daniel Defoe some
decades later. In this extract there are just two ‘sentences’; if anything it is
clearer here than in the prose of John Milton, that the concept of sentence has a
different meaning for Anna Trapnell than it does for us. Like Milton’s sentences
these are socially determined, and textually motivated. Socially, they are
groupings of clauses which seem to belong to what Trapnell considers relevant
social categories: ‘my biography’, ‘my credentials’. Textually, they are chunks
of linguistic material related by their form and function in the text-as-genre.
Unlike Milton’s sentences, which derived their organisations from (adherence to)
the rules of a well-understood rhetoric, Trapnell’s sentences derive their
organisation from principles of her own making, which themselves may have
come from criteria understood by and active in her community.
The point that I wish to make here is that we always draw on the resources
which we have available to us, for the purposes of making the representations
that we wish or need to make. In the process the existing resources are
transformed, reshaped in the direction of the requirements of the environment of
communication and by the interests of the maker of that message or
representation. That applied to Milton as much as to Trapnell, even though the
resources available to them in the same ‘language’ were entirely different, and the
social valuations of these resources unequal. Nevertheless, the processes were
the same for both, as they still are the same for anyone engaged in
communication. In both texts, that of Milton and that of Trapnell, we see the
emergence of the written sentence, out of the socially distinct resources of speech
of different kinds (and of the grammars of Greek and Latin in the case of
Milton). It would be a revealing study to attempt to see whose language, whose
resources, had the greater effect.
Simply for effect I will produce two kinds of sentence which I discuss
elsewhere in the book: both are from science textbooks. One is from 1936, the
other example from 1988.

When a current is passed through the coil in the direction indicated in the
figure we can show, by applying Fleming’s left-hand rule, that the left-
hand side of the coil will tend to move down and the right hand side to
move up.