Valoración de Pruebas

Samuel’s article on climate change is surprising, not in its choice of a topical issue, but in the strength of opinion expressed through the creative voice. As stated in Samuel's analysis, he based his style on the satire of the Guardian columnist, Charlie Brooker. Therefore, Samuel's stance is worded in a strong way, but it also engages. The use of the colloquial interjection ‘Oops’ draws attention to the paradox of using up resources:

Actually, on the topic of guilt, all these people who think they can save the world through living in darkness and eating out of bins need to get a grip on the situation. Doing any of the things that they believe can help the cause make such a negligible difference that it’s just as pointless as a UN security bill in Syria. Whatever minute amount they manage to save, someone out there is only going to counteract that by using more, making that little extra bit of effort go completely to waste. Oops.

The excuse for their rapid expansion – we did it. Which, when you think about it, is completely true and puts us in a rather hypocritical position, by saying that they need to stop or slow down despite our history with the same premise.

As Samuel explained in his interview, he was interested in current affairs. He regularly watched Question Time and took an interactive part by tweeting during the programme. So the creative voice drew on Samuel's academic domain as a geography student, as well as his social domain of television programmes. The piece merges Samuel's creative voices as a geography expert, with political and economic authority.

In his commentary, Samuel analysed the mixture of styles with academic rigour. It is interesting to note that although this shows a sophisticated understanding of how he manipulated his writing, he made several references to intention rather than referring to definite outcome, as in '[T]he style for the piece attempts to employ some comedic elements ... one of which being the elements modelled around the style of Charlie Brooker'. Here, the

stative verb ‘attempts’ indicates his intention, but also signposts that Samuel felt that his creative voice was not on a par with that of a successful journalist.

As with Emma and Lien, Samuel also showed awareness of the authority of his creative voice, as illustrated in the extract from his commentary below:

Due to the nature of the topic I chose, being climate change, there was need to include some scientific jargon like “anthropogenic”. This usage should have the effect of giving my article more credibility, while also exhibiting knowledge of the aforementioned subject. This knowledge will give my writing more authority on the subject and should help with the audience accepting myself as a respectable expert author on the subject.

Here, Samuel recognised the importance of the scientific lexis to support the scientific creative voice. Samuel links this to 'authority', which, with Emma and Lien, he perceived as being important to establishing voice.

Samuel’s domain map (see image 5) illustrates the direction of source domains which

influenced his creative voice. The domains represented in the domain map appear to join up to one point: the ‘Geog conference’. In fact, the domains are presented as cyclical: Samuel related the topic of climate change to his ‘knowledge of such’ to academic opportunities, as evidenced by the recent Geography conference he had attended. ‘Geog. Conference’ is not only central to

Samuel’s map, but repeated in the pictorial representation of the conference to the left of the map, which he has linked to his ‘[T]endency to argue/debate’ to create his creative voice.

Image 4.5 Samuel’s domain-mapping exercise

Samuel used ‘academic’ three times in his domain map in order to give authority to his depiction of his text. The style of Charlie Brooker is perhaps exemplified by the cartoon polar bear on top of the world crying out ‘Too hot!’ There is evidence of multiple discoursal selves revealed by the mapping exercises, as in the tension in Samuel’s map between the academic and humorous.

However, in the group discussion on his domain map for WSP, Samuel twice commented on the need to ‘tiptoe around’ in his language use. He contrasted 'think(ing) carefully about how

you would write' as a journalist with differentiating between 'writing for yourself' where 'you just blurt it out'.

Samuel:

you kind of feel the need to keep it clean because it’s not the sort of place that taboo words tend to feature – I don’t want really to say it lessens the range of vocabulary you can use but at the same time it certainly made you think more carefully about how you would write because I know with some of the points in mine they could have been quite sort of controversial or potentially offensive and so had to tiptoe around you felt the need to tiptoe around it but if you are writing for yourself you just blurt it out and not really worry about it

Like the other participants, Samuel had meta-awareness of how he was shaping his creative writing from the diverse influences he drew on, while presenting these influences with a creative voice that matched the choice of genre.