Principles of Familiar Essay and Their Practice, with the Theme of Love as an Example
| Autor: | Wang, Pei-Chun, 王佩君 |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 105 The Familiar essay genre was popular between the 19th and 20th centuries, but has not been considered academic nor formal due to its matters depicting daily life, colloquial tone, and free style writing. However, with the Internet fueling the rise of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it allows people to exchange information and share experiences with prose-writing. Thus, it is an important time to re-evaluate the familiar essay by exploring its writing skills and subject matters and by practicing these compositional principles on actual prose-writing. Therefore, it is the goal of this study to, first, delineate the features of the key elements in writing familiar essays, and secondly, demonstrate how these principles can be used in actual prose writing. To achieve this goal, this study has chosen three films under the theme of love as the subject matters for writing practice. The first work is The Best Offer, which provides the background for the discussion on one of the principles of familiar essays, i.e., point of view. When using the first person viewpoint to write a familiar essay, one wonders about the following questions. How does the situation describe the writer’s main idea? When using the third person viewpoint to convey the messages, is it the writer’s intention to hide his/her true feelings while narrating through others’ experiences or thoughts? The second principle of iv familiar essays is diction: word choice is another important element of composing familiar essays. In the novel entitled The Fault in Our Stars and its film adaptation, the two protagonists, Augustus and Hazel, are learned youngsters, who are liberal thinkers and also poetic writers. The daily dialogues and written letters between the two are verbally provocative in deep thoughts about life and love. The use of figurative language is one of key elements in an elaborate choice of diction; writing familiar essays cannot be achieved without proper figurative speech, such as personification, simile, and metaphor. These rhetoric devices allow the writer to render a more convincing and touching piece of writing. The third and the last principle of writing familiar essays to be dealt with in this study is tone, i.e., the sentiments and emotions underlying the verbal expressions and carrying hidden messages to be picked up by careful listeners. By drawing materials from the novel entitled Me before You and its movie adaptation, this research elaborates on the different aspects of tone. These aspects include writer’s attitude and the persona he/she assumes: both elements are among the most essential of tone application. The writer’s attitude is related to his/her innate cognition, personal emotion, and hidden intension. On the other hand, the writer’s persona is a mental mechanism of substitution: he/she can act as another person to inform the readers of his/her intended messages by using angry, relaxed or humorous styles, rather than using a showing-down lecture to convey messages. The study aims at facilitating young students as well as elderly people while they engage themselves in basically any forms of free-styled compositions. Furthermore, these principles can be particularly applied onto creative writing, online blog writing, daily correspondences, and even serious professional writing. With recourse to these principles, people can improve their self-expression, enrich their personal and social life, and enhance their sensitivity of language communication in the real world. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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