Academic Writing in English
Academic Writing in English is primarily intended for students in higher education. We have in mind students who are expected to hand in independently produced English as part of their programme requirements, for example in the form of assigned term papers, practice reports or a final thesis. But the book also offers valuable advice for non-students, for people in diverse professions who are assumed to possess good writing skills, but may not have them. We adopt an approach that gradually narrows the focus. We start out with a general discussion of the genre academic writing and its linguistic characteristics. We take students through the stages in the writing process, raising their awareness of the nature of the writing task and the appropriate level of style that the task requires. We also discuss matters of text cohesion, which is crucially important in text production. Most of these aspects can be referred to as macro-level concerns. Then, zooming in on the micro-level, the sentence level, we focus on problems that detract from the quality of any academic text, such as impoverished vocabulary, syntactic breakdowns and lack of compactness; Norwegian writers need to learn how to compress more meaning into fewer words. There is also a condensed presentation of the contrastive dimension, the main areas of grammar where Norwegian and English differ. A special chapter, central in all academic writing, presents the standard conventions for correctly acknowledging, referring to and quoting text-external voices. Plagiarism has no place in academic writing. It also includes advice on bibliography-making. Academic Writing in English provides its users with academic insight into the characteristics of well-written texts and offers practical advice on how to attain the same level in their own writing. The book is amply illustrated and includes innumerable exercises.
Lysv책g og Stenbrenden
Academic Writing in English
Per Lysv책g og Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden
Academic Writing in English A practical handbook
per lysv책g is retired Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Oslo. Over a period of some 30 years, he has authored and co-authored a number of textbooks for students of English. ph. d. gjertrud flermoen stenbrenden is Associate Professor of English Language at the University of Oslo. She has taught a wide variety of courses in English language, including academic writing, for more than 15 years. ISBN 978-82-02-44524-9
www.cda.no
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Academic Writing in English Preface We welcome users to this book on Academic English Writing, a book which should have been written long ago considering the increasing importance these days of good writing skills in Norwegian academic and professional contexts. With the obvious exception of the introductory chapter, our presentation starts at the macro-level, the text level (chapters 2–7), and moves on to the micro-level in chapters 8 (choice of academic vocabulary), 9 (mainly advice on cohesion and compression) and 10 (problems of contrastive grammar). Chapters 11 and 12 deal with the technicalities of correct academic writing such as referencing, including how to do bibliographies, and punctuation. Chapter 6 is a little different from the others. Our intention is to exemplify good writing from the diverse academic fields that are included in most English language programmes in Norway, as well as from two very different fields: political science and medicine. In that way we hope to kill two birds with one stone: to give you academic insight and to illustrate good writing. It may seem that academic writing within medicine or political science is dramatically different from that within the humanities. We disagree. Different types of academic writing may have different structures: a case or lab report and a monograph are obviously very different. It is our contention, however, that if you strip any academic text of its special terminology, the 3
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‘skeleton’ remains very similar indeed, and this skeleton is the English used in academic writing. To a large extent the chapters are self-contained units that can be worked through independently of each other, but there are frequent references across chapter boundaries. Most chapters contain relevant goal-directed exercises, suggested answers to which are available as a net resource. A few more comprehensive exercises are to be found in chapter 13. We wish to emphasize one point: writing good texts requires various skills, such as collecting relevant material, structuring and organizing it into coherent paragraphs, and an ability to reflect critically on the issue you address. If you can do this well in Norwegian, you have a head start when writing in English. What is specifically English, however, is how you apply the tools of the trade, your choice of vocabulary and the patterns of English grammar you make use of. That is why we provide more detailed information about these areas in chapters 8–10. This coverage necessarily draws on the meta-language of English linguistics. To do otherwise would be to relax on precision in our description. We are very grateful to our editor, Maria R. Braadland, and to the external readers, whose comments have helped make this book better than it otherwise would have been. Oslo, April 2014 Per Lysvåg and Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden
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1 Introduction
@@a raster kolon Terms: academic English
micro-level
academic writing
macro-level
1.1
Target group
This book is written for you, for students of English in higher education, who are expected to be able to read, understand, and speak English, and not least produce good written English.1 These basic skills to a large extent determine your success or failure as students. Most important perhaps among these is the quality of your writing because you are normally assessed on the basis of written work – term papers, take-home exams, final school exams, even theses. That is why we think this book is necessary. We have asked ourselves: What challenges does the average Norwegian student of English face, whether university student or student in teacher education, when sitting down to produce a text? These are our answers: (1) the ability to find evidence in material/data for whatever position the writer takes on an issue, and, not least, critically reflect on this evidence. 1.
Some material from Per Lysvåg (2005) The English Language appears in a modified form in this book with the author’s and publisher’s permission. Otherwise, in order to suit the needs of a wider user group, the present text contains new or fully revised material.
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(2) the ability to give the text a coherent and logical structure. That includes a clear reference to the wider context of the text (why do I write?), a transparent topic sentence (what do I write about?), good relevant sub-points (these are my arguments) and a convincing conclusion that follows from your arguments (this is my position). (3) the ability to find the appropriate stylistic level (which, of course, has to do with choice of language forms). (4) the ability to use the resources of the languages, both lexical and grammatical, to the full and in a varied and precise way. The first point above is to some extent independent of the form of the written text since it has to do with your general cognitive ability and fieldspecific knowledge. However, points 2–4 relate squarely to your writing skills: all those who are expected to produce good written English have the same challenges regarding points 2–4. That is why we think this book has considerable transfer value to other academic fields. So, more specifically, our primary target group consists of students of English in higher education; our second target group includes students, even academics, outside of English who are required to submit written work in English.
1.2
Assumed background
By the time you start your higher education, you have already had classes in English for anywhere from 8 to 12–13 years. This raises the question of your starting level. How good are your writing skills? What can we build on when our explicit goal is to raise your level of writing competence? There is obviously a lot of individual variation, but it is worth bearing in mind that most degree courses presuppose no more than a pass mark – high or low – in what is known as English VG1. Against this background, we have chosen to include in chapter 10 areas of English grammar which are known to create problems for Norwegian learners.
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1.3
Academic English
The term ‘academic English’ in the heading above is controversial in many ways. Rather imprecisely, it refers to the type of English used in academic publications, a type of English we hope you will be able to approach in your own writing. The ordinary ‘man in the street’, however, often associates an additional negative sense with the term: namely English that is made unnecessarily difficult and inaccessible. There is some truth in this. Even the neutral value-free sense of the term is not without complications, since it implies that it is fairly uniform with little individual variation. That is not the case. Some publications in academic fields – we venture to mention medicine and some of the natural sciences – are expected to adhere to the IMRaD model. Their text structure is more or less fixed, consisting of the sections Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion. This proscribed template for research articles in many prestigious journals leaves little room for the writer’s creative language frills. At the other extreme, we find the less conventionalized formats of articles in cultural studies, including literary research. They allow writers a very personal and subjective take on the form of their text. And in-between these extremes there is a lot of variation. Our stance is clear. Since the common tool is the English language, and the general skill is the ability to use this tool most effectively, we have decided to focus on the common features of this tool, the structural, logical, lexical and grammatical characteristics of English, cf. 2–4 in 1.1 above. The terminology that characterizes each separate field of science and scholarship is best learnt from field-specific textbooks, not from a general book on English writing. In addition, since we have our background in English language studies, we feel that we have a small contribution to make in this area. Massive exposure to the diverse applications of this tool helps build a solid writing competence, but acquiring this competence is a time-consuming process; there is no shortcut. The next best thing is probably to give a fairly detailed presentation of the macro-level and micro-level characteristics of good (and bad) English writing. That is what we do in chapters
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6–7 and 9–10. Here we give concrete and specific advice and encourage complementary student work.
1.4
Two ways of writing academically about English
To give you an idea of variation even within a narrow field of academic English, we include extracts A and B below. Both deal with language and the study of language. The first is the authors’ voice in a textbook; the second, the author’s voice in an MA thesis. A is much easier to understand because it is written for students, for non-specialists. The second presupposes specialist readers with considerable background in language studies. A For us a genre is a staged, goal-directed social process. Social because we participate in genres with other people; goal-oriented because we use genres to get things done; staged because it usually takes us a few steps to reach our goals. In this book we’re focusing on three familiar genres – story, argument, and legislation. We’ll look briefly at their staging here so we can get a feel for the basic organization of these texts. J. R. Martin and D. Rose (2008: p. 8)
B In order to address this apparent disparity between textual and contextual studies of genre, the primary objective of this study is to analyze and describe the structure and rhetorical function of the medical research article, using a combination of theoretical approaches. This includes register and genre analysis as well as a description of the medical discourse community in order to emphasize the relationship between written medical discourse (text) and the activity of medical research (context). D. L. Fryer (2007: p. 1)
A number of differences in their language form follow from the fact that the two are meant for different readers. We will go further into these in several 14
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places in our book, in 2.4 and most comprehensively in 5.2. But briefly: A has a personal style (us, we), uses everyday vocabulary (get things done, takes us a few steps to reach our goal, get a feel for), contains four sentences, which could easily have been transformed into six or seven (note the semicolons), allows informal contracted forms (we’re, we’ll), and not least, gives explicit explanations of difficult terms.
1.5
Academic English or Academic Writing in English
If we compare the alternative headings above, we notice a difference. Academic Writing in English includes writing, an -ing form that refers to an activity. This title can relevantly be understood either as a process, or as the end result of that process, cf. 1 and 2 below: (1) Academic writing is sometimes difficult to understand. (2) Academic writing requires special skills. (1) tells us that the end result, what has been written, is hard to grasp; (2) says that one needs special qualities to carry out the activity. In the following presentation we are concerned about both, but it would be counterproductive to try to maintain this distinction throughout the book. On balance therefore, and in view of the unfortunate implications of the term ‘academic English’, we have decided to use the title Academic Writing in English. We have now touched on many of the central elements in our book. Many of the terms will be developed further in later chapters. We hope you are tempted to read on.
1.6
Characteristics of good writing
With considerable anxiety (since our own skill is, literally, on the line for scrutiny) we will move on to the complex set of interrelated dimensions
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that must be handled competently for a text to deserve the verdict: good academic writing. The overall requirements are that: • you are well-informed about the topic you are addressing; • you have a personal view that is worth stating; • your position comes out clearly; • you choose a polite and appropriate form of language. These dimensions are developed further in the table below, where we break down language form into further sub-dimensions. Each of these, it is presumed here, in some way or other falls short of a good standard. Dimension where short coming may occur
Adjective to describe the result
Aid/remedy
knowledge of topic
un-/misinformed, irrelevant, ignorant, lacking in insight
field-specific textbooks
vocabulary
wrong, imprecise, repetitive, impoverished
dictionaries, books of synonyms, word finders
idiomaticity
awkward, unidiomatic, jarring
dictionaries, corpora on the web, phrase books
grammar
wrong, clumsy, ungrammatical, awkward
grammars, usage books
text design
illogical, confusing, ineffective, unstructured
writing manuals, exposure to clear texts, writing practice
text structure
incoherent, disconnected, rambling
writing manuals, handbooks, exposure to good writing, writing practice
paragraphing
unclear, confusing
raising of awareness of unity of content
appropriateness
offensive, impolite, too informal OR stilted, pompous, too formal
exposure to different registers
spelling
wrong
dictionaries
punctuation
wrong, confusing
reference works
The order of dimensions in this table to some extent also reflects the order of importance. Obviously, you will not be able to write well on a topic you 16
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know little or nothing about. In that case you will not have the necessary vocabulary either, nor the idiomatic flair to develop it. It is theoretically possible to write grammatically correct, but still boring, texts. The reason is often that the text does not make use of the rich resources of the language and becomes repetitive. Vocabulary, grammar, idiomaticity as well as spelling and punctuation belong to the clause/sentence level of the text – what is often referred to as the micro-level. On the macro-level we include those aspects which go beyond individual sentences, e.g. how you tie sentences together (text structure), how you organize the larger parts of your text (text design) and how you take into consideration your reader’s needs and the genre conventions that apply to the text type you are producing (appropriateness).
1.7
The language of this book
We have tried to use a modified academic style in this book since it is a textbook for students in higher education. Exposure to this type of language will, we hope, have a certain transfer value to your own writing. We have avoided the lexically dense style of professional journals and quality news reportage. Especially the former type of language has many technical terms, long sentences and complicated noun phrases. Although it may be hard to understand, it has its virtues, because it compresses a lot of meaning into few words. This quality is often lacking in the academic writing of Norwegians.
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