I’m not so scared anymore, things have figured out: I’ve got to know what’s the essay and I’m now feeling just really nervous about the presentation. But my point this time is reading.

During this semester I have possibly more academic books than ever before in my studying time. That’s not only because of the English course but because I have done more exams of the faculty than before. I have for example read about theatre historiography and the angles of the study of the literature, and right now (and last half of a year) I have got to know the fairy tales and their importance. Before I have mainly read one book now and then but this fall has been a hard piece. Mostly the texts I’ve read about and of my field have been articles from different sources.

For the English course I wanted to take a book which I would have read last year if I would have gone to the same course and that time it would had have something to do with my other studies also. Last year I did my bachelor and therefore studied my field, conversation analysis and got to know the introduction book of Schegloff’s. Because of the long queues in the library I bought the book from the amazon, but didn’t have enough time to read the whole book even if I wanted. That is why it was really nice to get the chance and compulsion to read something own-field-related. Other books I have recently read have been about my minor subjects. Reading has been fun and nice because the terms have been common for me in comparison to the language and terms of the theatre science which surprises me continually. The harder side of the reading has been the fact that Schegloff uses way too often unbelievably long sentences. Every now and then I have no chance of remembering the beginning or the meaning of it when I come to an end of it…

So, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m reading Emmanuel Schegloff’s book Secuence Organization in Interaction, which is a basic handbook of the sequence organization. This means I’ve been and I’m studying how people in interaction talk about certain topics or move to the topic. The conversation analysis do not judge the talking of the people but tries to find out the ways of talking, how certain structures build up, trying to find out the theory of conversation like how the other knows when the speaker is going to end speaking or how people get over of the problems. Sequence means the part of the conversation which is of certain topic or moving towards or continuing it. The basic sequence includes adjacency pair, but may have expansions before, in the middle or afterwards.

Main part of the sequence organization is also preference which means that certain kind of first pair part (beginning of the adjacency pair) waits for certain kind of second pair part (last part of adjacency pair). Interesting about preference is that how people try not to answer unpreferred way, those times they answer after a moment, circle around the straight answer and try to make the unpreferred answer sound preferred. Fascinating! I’ll go back to read…