Paper 1 Language and Representations-example response
Text A is from Mumsnet and is a forum discussion about
school Proms. The purpose of the discussion, initiated by the participant woollyideas, is to
seek reassurance from other Mums about
her view that school Proms and unnecessary and extreme.
The purpose of the website, Mumsnet is to promote the site and encourage other parents to join.
Some affordances of using forums are: that an individual can interact with many users, and they
are distant from other participants, so they can afford to convey their opinions strongly.
However,
some constraints of forums are that the absence of face-to-face conversation means that ideas mean
that meanings can be misconstrued, mainly due to the fact that participants cannot use paralingustic features,
emphatic stress and intonation.
The overall representation of school Proms in text A
is that they are ridiculous, extreme and unnecessary and Mumsnet is represented as authoritative,
useful but also friendly.
The participant woollyideas uses the stative verb “want” in
the interrogative “What sane parent would want to pay an entry fee to go to a “Prom Fair”...?”
This represents parents as emotionally
involved in and passionate about school Proms which, as it is
used within the interrogative shows that the efforts parents go to for their child’s Prom is ridiculous. The expressing of strong opinions
like these represents Mumsnet as a place for debate. The mode of
text A means that woollyideas is distant from the group of parents whom she is targeting,
so she can afford to convey her opinion
more strongly without directly offending them. By attacking
this group of parents, woollyideas positions herself above them.
Woollyideas goes on
to target this group of parents even more later on in the response when she
groups them by using the determiner “these” in the
interrogative “Who are these parents who think that this sort of expenditure...
is ok?”. In the post, woollyideas goes
from saying “What parent” to “these parents”- in the earlier part of the
response; she is being more general and using the singular form, then she later
using the plural grouping “these” parents in order to target them more directly,
which again puts them in a lower position than herself. It represents such parents as ridiculous and
conveys woollyideas’ disgust at the amount of money they spend.
The participant MuckyCarpet uses the subordinating conjunction “although”
in her response: “Don’t be a grump!, Although the helicopter is way OTT!”
At first, she expresses her strong opinion about Proms but
makes this more moderate by using the subordinating conjunction to contrast her view. This allows
her to conform with the other
participants, perhaps because she wants to avoid starting an
argument or causing offence. This shows that whilst Mumsnet is a place for debate, it is still
friendly. The use of the subordinating
conjunction shows that the participant has a balanced
viewpoint.
Within the first paragraph of the text explaining the rules
of the forum, a complex sentence is used:
“Please bear in mind that whilst this topic does canvass
opinions, it is not a fight club.” The conjunction “whilst” is used to introduce the subordinate
clause “whilst this topic does canvass
opinions”. The fact that this clause is subordinate shows that the
offering of opinions is not the most important thing about the forum. “It is not a fight club”
is the main clause of the sentence,
which shows that the most important thing to the creators of
the website is that users stay safe and that the debate is friendly.
This represents Mumsnet as a safe
place for debate that welcomes
everyone. A constraint of an online message board is that if
arguments occur, there is not a person there to mediate as the interaction is not face-to-face.
Therefore, the use of sentence structure here almost acts as this mediator. Furthermore, the positioning of this sentence
right at the beginning of the forum makes it clear to participants the
conventions of the debate in order to make them think before they post.
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