Misrepresenting Writing Pedagogy As Linguistic Theory

Martin & Rose (2007: 20-1):

Periodicity (the rhythm of discourse)

Here we’re concerned with information flow: the way in which meanings are organised so that readers can process phases of meaning. Helena for example doesn’t launch straight into her story by telling us she met a young man. To begin, she lets us know that she’s going to tell a story about a teenage farm girl in Eastern Free State:

My story begins in my late teenage years as a farm girl in the Bethlehem district of Eastern Free State.

And Tutu himself provided us with some more background to this story as he introduces it:

The South Africa Broadcasting Corporation's radio team covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission received a letter from a woman calling herself Helena (she wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals) who lived in the eastern province of Mpumalanga. They broadcast substantial extracts.

This means that by the time Helena begins we know what to expect — which genre (a story), and something about where and when it took place and who was involved. This kind of predictability is absolutely critical for digesting information, and we need to look carefully at the ways in which texts tell us what’s coming, alongside reminding us where we’ve been. Helena for example is just as clear about where her story ends:

I end with a few lines that my wasted vulture said to me one night

Here she lets us know that the predictions that helped us through the story are closing down, and that a transition to something different is coming, in this case a big hop back to Tutu’s argument. We use the term periodicity for these resources because they organise texts as waves of information; we surf the waves, taking a look back and forward on crests of informational prominence, so that we can glide smoothly through the troughs on the flow of meanings we expect.

Blogger Comments:

The system of periodicity — based on Martin (1992) but inconsistent with it, as previously explained here — is writing pedagogy misrepresented as linguistic theory.  Its concern is that of the

• introductory paragraph, rebranded as macro-Theme,
• topic sentence, rebranded as hyper-Theme,
• paragraph summary, rebranded as hyper-New, and
• text summary, rebranded as macro-New.