Yusuf Dawood's Surgeon's Diary' and his Autobiography, Nothing but the Truth: A Textual Evaluation

Abstract

This study sought a textual evaluation ofDawood's style in his sampled prose narratives. It was a linguistic study of literary texts, using linguistic theories of the social semiotics, the bottom-up top-down and the coding and analysis of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan approaches. Dawood's 'Surgeon's Diary' articles from the Sunday Nation newspaper were sampled, as well as Dawood's autobiography, Nothing But The Truth; which were classified under the categories of short story and novel respectively, under the broader narrative genre. The objectives of the research were to identify the main cohesive stylistic features in Dawood's written works. A comparison was then made of the similarities and differences in the style used in the two categories of the articles and the novel. A total of twenty-seven articles were sampled since 1980 when the author started writing, to 2008, using the systematic probability sampling procedure whereby one article in the last week in.the month of May each year was chosen. The autobiography was studied under the five sections of the book, namely, The Introduction, The Surgeon, The Writer, The Rotation and The Final Word. The introductory, middle and concluding paragraphs of each article and section of the book were sampled in order to establish whether or not there is cohesion throughout the said texts. The primary data from the texts was analyzed using the descriptive research design which was done using content analysis. Observation checklists were used to note the prevalent cohesive devices from the texts, and the frequencies of occurrence were calculated in terms of percentages. The stylistic variation per category of the narrative genre was also established. The process of data collection and analysis was done with reference to Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion (1976) in achieving the objectives of the study. The findings were such that there are specific major and mmor cohesive devices in Dawood's work; these ensure cohesion in the author's works, with a similar trend in the similarities and differences between the cohesive devices used in the narration of the short stories and the autobiography. The recommendations arising from this study, based on its conclusion were particularly related to the secondary level of education whereby the study of English and Literature are integrated. It is therefore important that some of Dawood's texts be considered as set books for study at the secondary school level since they are likely to offer sufficient readings regarding the use oflanguage - Dawood's texts exhibit the quality of wholeness as a single unit, despite the length of the text - proof of a text's cohesiveness. A lot of linguistic peculiarities in the expression of complex medical jargon in simple language probably offer an interesting read, with proper use of a variety of linguistic as well as literary techniques, especially after the comprehensive conclusion that a writer's style will most likely be similarly representative across his many works, as found out in previous studies and supported in this particular study in Dawood's case.