THE COMPARISON OF LEXICAL ITEMS AND OTHER MODES USED BY MALE AND FEMALE TRAVEL WRITERS: A MULTIMODALITY CASE STUDY ON TRAVEL BLOGS ABOUT NUSA LEMBONGAN BALI

Travel writings in blogs have become an international industry in highly popular literary genre. Each male and female travel writers has their own writing style in their blogs that can be seen from the highest lexical items, as textual mode, and visual modes they implement. In the present study, the writer used the analysis of multimodality in travel writings in blogs that might be effective to improve blogs and to show how they conformed to one another. Multimodality is an interdisciplinary combination of textual, audio, and visual mode with other media to make meaning. This study was aimed at analyzing the comparison of the modes used by male and female travel writers in their blogs about Nusa Lembongan, Bali, what the similarities and differences between the use of language (lexical items) and other modes (image, layout, colour, typography, and actor) were implemented by male and female travel writers, according to Bezemer & Jewitt (2010). Atkins and Rundell (2008)‟s types of lexical items covered lexical words, grammatical words, and compounds. This study used qualitative method with the design of mixed methods to find the highest frequency of lexical items in three male travel blogs and three female travel blogs by using Antconc 3.4.3w software as the corpus linguistics tool. The result of words used by male bloggers was 1368 Word Types and 3914 Word Tokens, while female bloggers was 1277 Word Types and 4656 Word Tokens. Only nouns island, bali, boats, place, trip, time; a verb see; an adjective big; and an adverb really were similar in male and female blogs. The different use was firstly from the nouns seaweed, people, coffee, life, temple, and balinese that showed male bloggers‟ favorite topics. Meanwhile, females used spots, fishes, dive, view, water, and snorkeling that showed their favorite topics for water sports such as snorkeling and diving. Other lexical items are discussed further in this study. This defined that females gave explanatory messages more than males. This is also supported by the result that females tend to exaggerate in explaining or describing something, incorporate feelings and emotions into their expressions as they are generally considered more expressive and emotional compared to men (Lakoff in Hanafiyeh and Afghari, 2014). In the case of visual multimodes, female blogs use more descriptively detailed images in every scenes with better layouts, various colours, eye-catchy typography, and include more participants in their writing as well as images besides themselves as the main actors. A bigger proportion of visual modes in male blogs is associated with photography about natural phenomenon and daily basis, and in female blogs, outdoor activities in the sea are more preferebly counted. Therefore, female bloggers tend to use longer text to give details, and male bloggers would like to use more visual modes such as images. The more the modalities involved, the higher the level of vocabulary memory is, thus it leads to the better recall (Arifuddin, 2012)