Archives for September 2009

Function – how to understand it

September 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Function – definition

Function is the term used to express the purpose of a text or of a speech act.

This function can be determined by the writer or by the reader.

Examples

Texts or spoken pieces might fall into one of the following broad categories:

WRITING

persuasion an advertisement

information a train timetable

entertainment a short story

instruction how to build a wardrobe

SPEECH

persuasion a sermon

information a radio weather forcast

entertainment a joke

instruction how to get from A to B

Use

The term ‘function’ is used as a technical term in linguistics and in literary criticism.

An awareness of function helps to produce efficient writing and speaking.

An awareness of function also results in efficient reading and listening.

NB! Function is one of the three important features of communication. The other two are audience and form.

The four general functions possess certain stylistic features or attributes:

Instruction the imperative mode and direct address
[Stir the mixture]

Persuasion emotive vocabulary
[beautiful, duty, militant, heart]

Information factual data
[time, locations, measurements]

Entertainment often breaks rules of grammar, spelling, pronunciation

Awareness of these in the production of speech or writing leads to effective communication and an appropriate style.

For instance, if we buy a product such as a chicken casserole from a supermarket we may be more interested in what’s in it than how to cook it. We may be interested in both these elements, but we certainly wouldn’t want them mixed together.

Food manufacturers for this reason present the list of ingredients [information] separately from how to prepare the dish [instructions]. This simple example shows the concept of function working efficiently.

If we receive a phone call from a close relative who comes to visit more often than we would like, we immediately try to ascertain the purpose [function] of the call. Is it –

an attempt to fix up the next visit? [persuade]
to tell us the possible dates? [inform]
to explain how their vegetables should be cooked? [instruct]
to tell us that the cat has learned to swim? [entertain]

In this example, the person who phones to arrange the visit may have every interest in obscuring the function of the call. As a recipient however, we are very interested in finding out what it is. Such is the crucial nature of function.

The National Curriculum for the teaching of English in Schools now states the importance of making children aware of the function of all the varied pieces they read and write.

Examining boards for A level English will only accept written work which has an authentic function. That is, it should be as close as possible to an example which could be used in real life.

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George Orwell – a guide to his writings

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novels, documentary reportage, essays

George Orwell (real name, Eric Blair) is renowned as a master of plain English prose style. He went out of his way to make himself understood to as many people as possible. He wrote in a very political era – the 1930s and 1940s. It’s hardly surprising that much of his work is written in support of democratic causes and as a warning against any form of totalitarianism, whether from the left or right. He started as a novelist of lower middle-class misery in the tradition of George Gissing, found a new strength in his reportages from working life and the Spanish Civil War, and ended his short life with two rather un-English books which have become classics of the political novel. he was not a great writer of the first rank, but a very decent man with a gift for clear expression and a desire to tell the truth and expose the fake. Martin Seymour Smith sums him up admirably by saying “he was a master of lucidity, of saying what he meant, of exposing the falsity of what he called double-think”

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
This is a social documentary about Orwell’s true-life (and self-imposed) experiences scraping a living and being homeless in the two capitals. Although it is fairly obvious that his plight is self-inflicted, the book contains memorable scenes of working as a plongeur in a restaurant, living alongside dossers and tramps, and queuing for an overnight bed at the Salvation Army hostel. Orwell strikes a note of unflinching realism in this his first book. Very readable, and an interesting commentary on between-the-wars experiences.
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
Orwell’s semi-autobiographical third novel – almost a modern Grub Street. Gordon Comstock is an aspiring poet who works as an advertising copy-writer. He hates his job, helping to sell mundane products. So he gives it up and works in a bookshop to support himself whilst failing to find literary success. He is in a constant state of war against what he calls the ‘Money God’ – the commercial requirements of the market place – to which he eventually succumbs. However, he does in the end achieve success of a human kind by getting married and becoming a father.
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The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
This hybrid book is a famous piece of sociological reportage. Whilst other people theorised about the working class, Orwell went to spend time with Lancashire miners in the depression of the 1930s. This is his account of how they lived and worked. It made an enormous impact at the time and still speaks with a voice of truth and authenticity about a level of griding poverty which fortunately no longer exists. Part One describes the appalling conditions in which many people lived at the time. Many people were shocked by the scenes he describes. In Part Two he expounds his personal strategy for Socialism, using an account of his own personal journey from public schoolboy and member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, to Left-wing author and crusading journalist. This is one of the few books to emerge from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club which is still worth reading.
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Homage to Catalonia (1938)
This is possibly Orwell’s best book. It offers a vivid first-hand account of the Spanish civil war, in which he fought between 1936 and 1937. It includes a wonderfully upbeat sketch of Barcelona whilst it was briefly under control of the anarchists and Trotskyists. This is nevertheless the first of Orwell’s warnings about the betrayal of good causes by ideologues. All his political judgments turned out to be more or less correct in the long term, though he was criticised by both Left and Right at the time. This is the literature of commitment at its very best, and a very good example of truthfulness in political reportage. It also includes instructions on how to successfully achieve an all-over wash in a mountain stream at sub-zero temperatures.
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Coming Up for Air (1939)
Written at the height of the political disappointments of the 1930s, this is possibly Orwell’s most pessimistic book. George Bowling is a middle-aged insurance clerk trapped in a loveless marriage. He tries to escape by revisiting the idyllic past of his childhood in Lower Binfield. But when he gets there, like all pasts, it has vanished. The only thing he has to look forward to in the end is the prospect of war – which when the book was published was just around the corner.
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Collected Essays and Journalism
It’s possible that Orwell’s essays will outlast most of his fiction. These are perceptive and well-written meditations on politics, nationalism, language, and what we now call mass communications – newspapers, radio, and popular culture. It’s interesting to note that these essays, which at the time they were written were challenging the status quo, are now used as models of good practice by the educational establishment.
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Animal Farm (1945)
This is a rare case of a modern fable that works convincingly. It’s Orwell’s satirical allegory of the betrayal of the Russian revolution – transposed to struggles between the animals and humans on Manor Farm. Th revolution is a success, but is then betrayed by corruption and factional in-fighting amongst the animals themselves – with political slogans such as the now famous ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Orwell’s best-known work. The title alone has passed into common use as a term for a totalitarian dystopia. Ordinary citizen Winston Smith battles to maintain the values of rational humanism against the fascist state which is under the control of Big Brother. This is a society where people are made to conform to orthodoxy by the Thought Police. He is helped by his love for Julia, a fellow humanist, but eventually, under torture in Room 101, he betrays her. Orwell was much influenced by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, which he reviewed in the 1930s.
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George Orwell: Essays
This is an anthology which includes George Orwell’s most famous pieces, among them My Country Right or Left, The Decline of the English Murder and How the Poor Die. With insight and wit, Orwell writes on a series of wide ranging topics, from the Spanish Civil War to a defence of English cooking. Some of his generalisations about ‘English character’ might now strike us as a little jingoistic, but on the whole these essays are models of combative thinking and good prose.
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George Orwell: A Life This is the more-or-less standard biography, which was written in 1980 and has since revised twice. Bernard Crick puts his emphasis on Orwell’s politics. There are other more recent biographies, but Crick’s will help you to understand the social and ideological background to the turbulent period through which Orwell lived and wrote. It’s particularly good for understanding the strained allegiances amongst socialists and liberals caused by the Stalinist betrayal of the revolution.

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George Orwell chronology

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1903. George Orwell born as Eric Arthur Blair in Mothari, Bengal. His father was an English government official in the Opium department.

1904. Blair moves with mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin and older sister, to Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, to be educated in England, according to Anglo-Indian tradition.

1908. Attends Anglican convent school in Henley.

1911. Attends St Cyprian’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne.

1917. Attends Eton as a King’s Scholar.

1921. Leaves Eaton, but does not go on to university.

1922. Joins the Indian Imperial Police and serves as an officer in Burma.

1927. Resigns from Indian Police and returns to England.

1928. Goes to Paris to become a writer.

1929. Money runs out – returns to England and becomes a tramp.

1932. Secures a job teaching in a private school.

1933. Publishes Down and Out in Paris and London using the pseudonym George Orwell.

1934. Works in a bookshop in London. Publishes his first novel – Burmese Days.

1935. Meets his future first wife, Eileen Maude O’Shaughnessy. Publishes A Clergyman’s Daughter.

1936. Visits the north of England, researching working conditions amongst miners. Marries Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Publishes Keep the Aspidistra Flying Goes to Spain and joins the POUM to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

1937. Shot through the neck and returned to England. Publishes The Road to Wigan Pier.

1938. Publishes Homage to Catalonia.

1939. Publishes Coming Up for Air.

1940. Publishes Inside the Whale

1941. Joins the BBC as a talks producer and broadcaster for India. Publishes The Lion and the Unicorn. Writes reviews for Time and Tide, Tribune, The Observer, Partisan Review, and Manchester Evening News,

1943. Resigns from the BBC and becomes literary editor of Tribune.

1944. Completes Animal Farm, but no publisher will accept it. He and Eileen adopt baby boy, Richard.

1945. Resigns from Tribune to become war correspondent for The Observer. Death of wife Eileen. Animal Farm published and becomes successful overnight.

1946. Leaves London to live with son and nurse on the island of Jura.

1947. Becomes ill and enters hospital near Glasgow.

1948. Returns to live on Jura.

1949. Enters a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. Nineteen Eighty-Four published to instant success. Admitted to University College Hospital, and marries Sonia Brownell, a former colleague from Tribune.

1950. Dies of tuberculosis and is buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays.

1953. Such, Such Were the Joys

George Orwell: A Life is the more-or-less standard biography, written in 1980 and revised twice since then. Bernard Crick puts his emphasis on Orwell’s politics. There are other more recent biographies, but Crick’s will help you to understand the social and ideological background to the turbulent period through which Orwell lived and wrote. It’s particularly good for understanding the strained allegiances amongst socialists and liberals caused by the Stalinist betrayal.

Gerald Brenan biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.

South from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.

Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.

The Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published

After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Glossary of essay instruction terms

September 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

common terms used in essay questions

1. Instruction terms are words commonly used in essay questions. They instruct or direct you in the approach you should take towards the proposition of the question.

2. The exact meaning of these terms will vary depending upon the subject being studied. The following give some idea of what they normally mean for essays and examination questions.

3. Think carefully about the meaning of these terms in relation to the remainder of the question. Even though you might feel confident, do not become blasé or inattentive. Sometimes even experienced students forget the important difference between Compare and Contrast.

4. Try to understand exactly what an instruction is asking you to do – but be reasonable. Don’t look for problems where they might not exist. If in doubt, ask your tutor.

account for
Explain the reasons for, giving an indication of all relevant circumstances. Not to be confused with ‘Give an account of’ which asks only for a detailed description.

analyse
Study in depth, identifying and describing in detail the main characteristics.

argue
Put forward a proposition, then illustrate it, discuss its significance, and defend it against possible counter-charges.

assess
Examine closely, with a view to ‘weighing up’ a particular situation. Consider in a balanced way the strengths and weaknesses or points for and against a proposition. In conclusion, state your judgement clearly.

comment
State clearly and in moderate fashion your opinions on the material in question. Support your views with reference to suitable evidence or explanations.

compare
Look for similarities and differences between two or more things.

contrast
Deliberately single out and emphasise the differences and dissimilarities between two or more things.

criticise
Give your judgement about a statement or a body of work; explore its implications, discussing all the evidence which is available. Be specific in your examination.

define
Set down the precise meaning of something. Be prepared to state the limits of the definition. Take note of multiple meanings if they exist.

describe
Give a detailed and comprehensive account of something.

discuss
Investigate and examine by careful argument. Explore the implications and the advantages or disadvantages. Debate the case and possibly consider any alternatives. This is probably the most common instruction term. It is inviting you to say something interesting in response to the topic in question. You can choose your own approach.

evaluate
Make an appraisal of the worth of something in the light of its truth or utility. Emphasise the views of authorities as well as your personal estimation.

explain
Make plain. Account for. Clarify, interpret, and spell out the material you present, giving reasons for important features or developments.

how far …
Similar to questions which begin ‘To what extent…‘. You are expected to make your case or present your argument, whilst showing an awareness that alternate or even contradictory explanations may exist. Careful assessment and weighing of evidence are called for.

identify
Pick out what you regard as the key features of something, perhaps making clear the criteria you use in doing so.

illustrate
Make clear and explicit by the discussion of concrete examples.

justify
Show adequate grounds for decisions or conclusions. Answer or refute the main objections likely to be made against them.

outline
Give the main features or the general principles of a subject, omitting minor details and emphasising structure or arrangement.

relate
Show how things are connected, and how they possibly affect, cause, or resemble each other.

review
Make a survey of, examining the subject critically.

state
Present the main points in brief, clear form.

summarise
Give a concise account of the main points of a matter, omitting details and examples.

trace
Follow the development or history of a topic from some point of origin.

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Grammar – how to understand it

September 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Grammar – definition

The term ‘grammar’ refers to the structure of language.

This can be applied to a whole language or to any smaller unit of that language.

Grammatical study is often a systematic account of the rules of sentence structure, syntax, and semantics.

Examples

The study of grammar in any language focuses on:

tense concerning time sequence

person reference to people or things

syntax how parts relate to each other

A grammatical study of the following brief statement focuses on the same issues:

The cats drank the milk

The cats Subject – third person plural

drank Verb – past tense

the milk Object – third person singular

Notice that the statement follows normal English syntax (word-order)

Subject — Verb — Object

Use

An awareness of grammar or the structure of language can result in more efficient writing and speaking.

An understanding of the mechanics or workings of language is far more useful and more easily acquired than memorising technical terms.

You can understand the mechanics of language by studying utterances and their:

audience — form — function

The study of grammar in any language focuses on:

tense John ran up the stairs
[past tense of the verb]

person Joanna approached him
[third person singular]

syntax The dog bit the man
[subject – verb – object]

NB! Most people are not conscious of grammatical rules — but they use them quite naturally when speaking.

It is useful to be able to distinguish between the more grammatical items in a statement and those which have a mainly lexical function.

The grammatical items are the working parts of the statement, whilst the lexical items carry content or meaning.

There is no absolute distinction between grammatical and lexical items. However, it is possible to think of a continuum, with lexis at one end and grammar at the other.

For instance, the items in in the following statement can be seen as lexical, grammatical, and a combination of both:

‘Dorothy likes to come to our house every Tuesday and have tea with us.’

lexical Dorothy, house, Tuesday, tea

grammatical to, and, with

The terms ‘our’, ‘every’, and ‘have’ are between these two categories because they perform both a lexical and a grammatical function.

The study of English grammar study has developed over hundreds of years. The objective has generally been to find a set of rules which accurately and comprehensively define, describe, and explain the workings of the language.

In the past, grammar study was very prescriptive. Rules were laid down as to how English must be used. Many of these prescriptive rules were based on the rules of the Latin language which historically had strong religious and cultural ties with English.

Latin was regarded as the perfect language and as such was used as a model for English. However, it was a blueprint which didn’t fit, and the struggle to make it fit has left us with such prescriptive rules as ‘Never end a sentence with a preposition’.

In the past, the study of grammar was thought to be a series of rules and regulations:

Rules for writing good English
Learning to analyse sentences grammatically

The most significant development this century has been the move towards a descriptive and functional approach to understanding of the workings of English. That is to say, the emphasis currently is on observing how the language is actually operating in practice. Changes are charted and variations noted, with a neutral attitude.

A language is best seen as a living organism which is constantly in the process of evolution. The nature of its changes reflect and affect its users. As Latin has been a dead language for hundreds of years, its imposition on English is at best interesting and at worst ludicrous.

Every language has a basic structure. This is composed of its essential grammatical features, which are its working parts. It also has more superficial features such as its vocabulary, which changes and develops in accordance with cultural and social phenomena.

A good example of this can be seen in the recently acquired technological terms associated with the advent of the computer. The terms ‘hard disk’, ‘floppy drive’, ‘Web site’, ‘Internet’, ‘mouse’, and ‘downloading’ simply didn’t exist thirty years ago. Indeed, the World Wide Web – for many people the centre of the Internet – was only invented as recently as 1993.

Noam Chomsky perhaps made the most significant impact on the study of grammar by his Innateness Theory, which is now universally accepted as basically valid.

The Innateness theory of grammar is based on the notion that humans are genetically programmed to acquire language. The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a function which equips us for speech, just as other genetic features equip us for walking or breathing.

The prerequisite for language acquisition is what Chomsky calls comprehensible imput – which is hearing people around us use language.

Thousands of different languages exist, and the developing child acquires the language of its own culture. The vocabulary and content has to be learnt, but the fundamental grammatical workings are innate.

Evidence of this LAD at work can be observed in the so-called mistakes which young children make. These are utterances such as ‘I comed home’ or ‘I wented over there’ or ‘those two sheeps’ and ‘those three mouses’.

What is happening here should be celebrated as evidence of the child’s capacity for grammatical analysis. That is, the rule has been learned but over-applied.

The expression ‘I comed’ is evidence that the child has internalised the rule for forming the past tense, which is – add ‘—ed’.

‘Sheeps’ and ‘mouses’ show that the rule for forming a plural has been learnt — add ‘—s’.

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Graphology – how to understand it

September 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Graphology – definition

Graphology is the study of the system of symbols which communicates language in written form.

In its more popular sense, it is the study of handwriting.

Examples

This is an example of a pictographic symbol.

Use

In the English language, writing starts on the left and moves to the right. It begins at the top of the page and moves downwards.

This might seem rather obvious, but writing in some other languages is arranged differently. Hebrew moves from right to left in rows, and Japanese from top to bottom in columns.

NB! Graffiti is a type of graphology, but if you confuse the two you’ll end up in trouble.

Graphology in context. ‘Grapheme’ is the term for the smallest unit of written communication. A letter of the alphabet or a punctuation mark is a grapheme. A scientific, mathematical, or any other kind of symbol is also a grapheme.

English is an ideographic language. This means that the writing system is based on a set of symbols. These have no intrinsic connection with what they are expressing.

Chinese on the other hand is known as a logographic or pictographic language. This is because the characters of that language were historically pictorial representations of the object being expressed.

Over the centuries these pictures have been stylised to the extent that they no longer resemble houses, people or trees. They now seem, to the uninitiated, just as arbitrary in their function as the English alphabet.

In linguistic study, graphology is a level of analysis along with phonology, vocabulary, grammar and semantics. It includes the study of layout, the use of logos and any other feature of graphical communication.

Children learn to form individual letters and later to produce joined-up writing. Some students find it difficult to make the transition from upper case printing to continuous script. This can be a significant impediment to their studies.

However, with literacy and maturity, we develop our own style of hand-writing. There is commonly a variation in the way we form our letters which is subject to context.

For instance, we may form a flamboyant ‘s’ at the end of a word, but a conservative version of that same grapheme if it occurs in an initial or medial position.

It is important to be able to distinguish between upper and lower case letters in order to punctuate. This is not possible with printing. Continuous script can also be produced much more rapidly.

Continuous script is easier to read than printing, because the eye is led by the connecting strokes between the characters. This is the same principle as the use of sefifed fonts in the layout of continuous writing.

Approaches to teaching hand-writing have changed over the years. It is interesting to note that each generation seems to have its own style of handwriting. Our parents and their contemporaries seem to produce the same script style, while their parents’ generation also have their own similarly distinct style.

Perhaps parallel with the phenomenon of speech style, handwriting styles are easier to categorise from a distance. Our children may see our contemporaries’ handwriting as belonging to an identifiable style, whilst we ourselves consider each person’s handwriting to be idiosyncratic.

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Harold Nicolson biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was born into an upper middle-class family in Tehran, where his father (Lord Carnock) was the British ambassador to Persia. as it then was. He was educated at Wellington College then Balliol College Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class degree. He entered the diplomatic service in 1908 and was posted to Constantinople where he became a specialist in Balkan affairs. In 1910 he met Vita Sackville-West and despite her reservations about his diplomatic career (and her parents’ about his social status) they married in 1912 and had two sons.

He published biographies of the French poet Verlaine and studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Saint-Beuve. His first major success (and still probably his best book) was Some People (1927), a witty collection of short stories and character sketches based on people he had met in the diplomatic service.

He and his wife were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as visitors to Ottoline Morrell’s weekend parties at Garsington in Oxfordshire. Whilst Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis, he had liaisons with a series of men, including the literary critic Raymond Mortimer. They had a rather unusual marriage in which they lived separately a lot of the time, wrote to each other on almost a daily basis protesting their undying love to each other, and continued to have affairs with members of their own sex. All of this was recorded by their son in his Portrait of a Marriage.

After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). At the end of 1929 he left the diplomatic service and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard. Despite (or maybe because of) his literary skills, he hated journalism: “It is a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”.

In the 1930s, he and his wife bought Sissinghurst Castle, in the rural depths of Kent, the county known as the garden of England. There they created the renowned gardens that are now run by the National Trust. However, during the week he lived at the Albany, the famous bachelor chambers just off Piccadilly in London. He flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament.

He turned to broadcasting and returned to journalism as an occupation. He was personally acquainted with a wide variety of figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures. His Diaries provide a rich source of information on the world of diplomacy and politics in the years 1910-1960, and record meetings with Picasso, Diaghilev, Matisse, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape what he felt as his ‘plebeian’ surname. He spent the latter part of his life writing and developing the gardens at Sissinghurst.