Free Essay: Importance of Creativity in Terms of Social, Cultural and Critical Dimensions

Creativity is the concept of having new exploration and application of new ideas from such explorations into whatever someone is doing. Jones associates creativity with innovativeness, genius, and originality of thoughts and ideas. In short, creativity entails inventiveness. It appears in everyday life, such as in language, art, technology, business, and so forth. Linguistic creativity is a term that involves the use of varied meanings and interpretations of language by the user to present different impressions. The language currently uses creativity to bring to attention the essential and intended information. For instance, advertisements involve a lot of creativity. Furthermore, language, art, production, and daily human activity make use of creative ability. Jones advocates for creativity in socio-cultural and critical dimensions. This paper explores Jones' view of creativity and its importance in communication. It evaluates Jones' views on the importance of creativity in social, cultural, and critical dimensions.

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First, creativity is essential in strategic demonstration and achievement of social contexts to create awareness and bring critical changes to the world. The author of "Creativity and Discourse" mentions that we should not only test language used on its literariness but also on its focus on the level of creativity employed to address a given issue. According to Jones (2010), 'Creativity and discourse' is a very significant concept, and scholars and society should not take it for granted. The sociolinguistics professor explains that there exists a great deal of creativity in works such as HIV prevention pamphlets, and speeches by political figures may appear to be less creative in terms of literal perspectives. These works use a kind of creativity that captures the attention of the audience and hence transform the social lives of people.

Jones makes a reasonable case by mentioning that 'discourse and creativity' incorporate linguistic creativity in promoting social welfare in different avenues. Creativity does not limit itself to texts and language patterns but pays attention to how the texts relate and connect with their social context. Jones (2010) points to Cook's (1994) 'Discourse and Literature' to bring to attention the understanding that literature requires a combination of stylistic perspectives ranging from traditional to modern ways of understanding and contextual meanings. The scholar uses schema theory to support his view that the mental representation of the information passed on is as much important as the language the artist uses in the text.

Jones argues that the traditional method of evaluating the literariness in terms of extra-textual perspectives harbors traces of social contexts and contains important socio-cultural messages within them. He mentions that discourse-analytical models of stylistics have aided the understanding that literature is the mother of language literariness. Therefore, he argues that new approaches to literature and language have seen language explorers seek to understand the creativeness of social media messages, advertisements, casual conversations, and journalism (Maybin, 2015). Jones' reference to works by Simpson, Cater, Cook, and Hall on discourse-analytical models enhances his insinuation that proper advertising, promotion of human awareness, and critical conversations would not happen if creativity lacked in such cases.

According to Jones (2010), Ron Carter supported the importance of creativity in language, in his 'The Art of Everyday Talk' when he argued that linguistic creativity is not an asset of exceptional people but rather an exceptional concept of every person (Carter, 2015). In this sentiment, Jones claims that creativity in linguistics should be subject to use by everyone, and not for a few select individuals.

We use language styles in our everyday life: in our workplaces, family conversations, and casual talks. It is with similes, metaphor, symbolism, irony, humor, understatement, hyperbole, repetition, and so on that makes our speech and messages effective. Jones (2010) and Carter (2015) agree that these stylistic devices do not only add flavor to literature but also play important social roles.

To mention but a few, parents can use symbolism, hyperbole, irony, and metaphors to induce caution and good behavior into their children. The process of coining the message into a metaphor, simile, and so on, is a great skill and a mark of creativity by the user. Jones pays more attention to Carter's analysis of literature, not on the forms of the texts but the contextual use and social importance of the literary texts. According to Jones (2010), Carter (2015) was keen to identify the part played by language in promoting solidarity and harmonious relationships between friends and people within a society. Jones' methodology of borrowing other scholars' ideas in his field of study blends well with his reasoning and deployment of arguments.

In their " The Routledge companion to English language studies," Maybin & Swann (2010) also highlight several contributions creativity in language offers to the socio-cultural and critical perspectives. These two authors seem to agree with Jones that research on language has taken a new direction towards analysis and enhancement of linguistic creativity. To start with, Maybin & Swan (2010) express that researchers no longer pay attention to language as an identifier of the speaker's identity or the cultural contexts in which it is used. These two researchers claim that discourse in language has contributed to the reproduction of identities, cultures, and institutions. There have emerged new ways of writing, speaking, pronunciation, articulation, structuring of words in a text to convey the intended information more effectively.

Jones (2010) mentions that creativity in language use should not focus on the message for its right only but also on the level of creativity within the message and how well the message interacts with the social practices and contexts. Jones insists that creativity is part of a well-deployed message and that social settings need creativeness to blend well with the language. According to Jones (2010), Maybin & Swan (2007) support his view that linguistic creativity and language creativity require a demarcation so that we do not only pay attention to the message in the text/art but also on the creativity used to express the message. This way, Jones (2010) suggests that the message will find an essential function in linking up social practices, processes, and critical dimensions.

Jones's contribution towards the creativity discourse not only indicates the relationship between creativity and discourse in the wide range of literary reading domains but also on how the creativity discourse has developed over the years. The creativity discourse has overgrown in terms of scope, and it is even forging interdisciplinary bridges with other disciplines such as sociology, visual communication, media studies, and others. More questions have been raised than answers on its increasing interest in texts and interpretation. The discourse analysis has taken up more on issues of identity construction, as seen in this study of Jones (2010).

The extensiveness of language creativity has an instantaneous implication for practice and policy in several areas that include education. The current approach proposed by many scholars, including Jones, for instance, points towards ludic gaps that exist between lack of playful use of language and linguistic worlds of kids. As Jones (2010) affirms, these kinds of current orthodoxies existing in task-based and communicative approaches to linguistic languages suggest that learning can be enhanced with the inclusion of an element of play. Such ideas of creativity may be viewed as a broader theoretical that refocuses on the sociolinguistics and contemporary application in which creativity of language users comes to fashion communicative and linguistic resources rather than producing all static rules that pertain to creativity in language use.

Both Jones (2010), and Maybin & Swan (2007) affirm that various speaking styles such as crossing, style-shifting, and code-switching focus on the creative styling of our everyday life. They further state that a practice-based approach that focuses on the literacy study emphasizes on the participants' active, creative roles that embraces literacy practice to epitomize creative histories, social identities, and social relationships. From a different perspective, their views do not put into consideration the communicative strategies that may be adopted by different individuals as unconstrained. Nonetheless, their emphasis on language users' creativity can be termed as consistent with the literary like practices or routine use of literary practices.

The studies conducted by Jones on the triad activities of the Hong Kong Federation youths are seen to be a reflection of traditional conceptions of context. I say this with uttermost authority since his evidence was attributed to an ethnographic study. When one bases his or her evidence on such a conception of context, then it is seen to have an external effect on the text since it affects its interpretation and production. The type of model underpins the extensive analysis of computerized corpora.

The ethnographic study is seen to be a static model since it only affords a systematic comparison between different settings and speakers (Stubbs, 1983). Nevertheless, the attention at which Jones is paying for the functions of creativity and discourse, for instance, on friendly relations and building solidarity, points to a more potent dynamic model that both defines creativity as both contextualizing and contextualized.

This potent dynamic model that focuses on processes involved in contextualization instead of static sense context would essentially foreground all the dialogic nature of an individual's creativity, hence seeing creative scenes as being jointly constructed between elaborated and incorporated voices of the participants. Jones (2010) ignores to acknowledge the critical socio-historical and socio-cultural dimensions of creativity of the Hong Kong Federation of the youths that are seen to be the conceptions of creativity and discourse in which historical and culturally variables exists where they may emerge to form new creativities in terms of the changing particulars of purposes and goals (Stubbs, 1983).

Jones acknowledges that discourse and creativity can, in some instances, be used critically or antagonistically though the data he uses from the interviews is associated with solidarity. From my perspective, the critical dimension related to creativity is built on the linguist's interest in his or her interactional functions. By drawing attention to individuals' art of creativity, the artful language performance is highlighted and framed within the context of an ongoing means of communication, hence intensifying the artful communicative experience which holds the contents and performances for evaluation and display (Stubbs, 1983). I can also suggest that the framing equally renders the artful language performance to be more likely to be preserved as a recontextualized and comprehensible stretch of language creativity in other future contexts.

As Jones (2010) concludes, he says that aside from the various examples used in his studies to explore the language being employed on strategic action, he says that he can argue that his journal is just a representation of orientation based on discourse and creativity. He further claims that the World's Englishes itself represents the following.