7.2 Discursive Features of Academic Writing
What is it about academic and disciplinary texts that students find alienating and intimidating? Compared to everyday writing — that is, writing done for ordinary purposes — academic writing is generally considered more formal, dense, abstract, precise, cautious, and reasoned. There is also an expectation that academic writing is authoritative, tightly knit, and well-supported. The difference between academic writing and everyday writing is not dichotomous, however. Rather, it is best conceived of as a continuum where the degree of density, abstraction, formality, conventionality, generalization, technicality, connectivity, tentativeness, precision, organization, explicitness, authoritativeness, and responsibility increases as writers move from writing for ordinary purposes to writing for academic purposes. This continuum, informed by the work of systemic functional linguists (e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1985) and corpus linguists (e.g., Biber & Gray, 2016), is shown in Figure 7-1 below.
Figure 7-1 Stylistic Continuum in Academic Writing
In light of this continuum, Fang (2012b, 2017) suggested that every piece of academic writing can be viewed as the braiding of three strands of language— everyday language, written language, and metaphoric language, with the shape of the braid determined by factors such as topic, purpose, audience, and context. Everyday language — such as Plants need light because if they don't have it they will die. — refers to the mother tongue; it is the language students grow up with. That is, it is the language students use in their daily life, where they engage with commonsense knowledge in informal interactions with family members and friends around the dinner table, on the playground, or at the birthday party. This language, when written down, sounds "colloquial", "fragmented", "dynamic", and often "ungrammatical". Written language — such as Light is so important to plants that they cannot survive without it. — refers to the language of literacy; it is not spontaneous spoken language written down, but rather the language used for reading and writing. It is often associated with the language of schooling through which students learn educational knowledge, which is a more abstract form of knowledge than commonsense knowledge. This language differs in both texture and organization from everyday language. Metaphoric language — such as The importance of light to the survival of plants cannot be overstated. — refers to the language of specialized disciplines and is often associated with power and prestige. This language represents experience in a way that is incongruent with how we humans typically construe our experience in everyday life, often resulting in discourse that is highly distilled and compact. Any text can be considered an instantiation of a particular way of braiding, with a certain strand (or strands) more heavily present in some texts (or portions of a text) than in others.
Although certain features, such as those identified in the far right column of Figure 7-1, are commonly recognized as "academic", they manifest in different ways across different genres, disciplines, social, and historical contexts (Biber & Gray, 2016; Hyland & Jiang, 2017). One reason for this variation is that academic communities are composed of individuals with "diverse experiences, expertise, commitments, and influence" whose language and literacy practices are influenced by "the personal and interpersonal, as well as the institutional and sociocultural" (Hyland, 2004, p. 9). We know, for example, historians write differently from biologists, who write differently from mathematicians, who write differently from legal scholars. Another reason for the variation has to do with the growing presence of bilinguals and multilinguals as a result of globalization. These individuals bring unique cultures, ideologies, identities, experiences, and rhetorical styles to their discursive practices, further challenging the homogeneity of academic writing and giving rise to diversity and hybridity in the way language is used in academic and disciplinary settings. For example, the writing of scholars whose English is their second or foreign language is likely more or less influenced by their first language and native culture. Writers with different English language and literacy proficiencies or educational backgrounds are likely to write in somewhat different styles as well. This explains why articles from the same academic journal can be more or less abstruse or reader-friendly. These discursive differences stem from differences in what British educational sociologist Basil Bernstein (1971/2003) called "coding orientations", or ways of making meaning. They are a manifestation of the differences in our backgrounds and in the ways we have been socialized (through upbringing or schooling) into particular discourse communities.
There is also considerable internal lexicogrammatical variation within academic writing across disciplines and genres, with scientific writing, for example, exhibiting extreme reliance on phrasal structure and writing in the humanities relying more heavily on clausal modification (Biber & Gray, 2016). As Hyland (2004) explained, texts within the same academic discipline tend to display similar "preferences for particular argument forms, lexical choices and discourse structures" because they adopt similar approaches and address "similar questions about a similarly conceived external world" (p. 177). Schleppegrell (2004) showed that different school-based genres — personal (e.g., recount, narrative), factual (e.g., procedural, report), and analytical (e.g., account, explanation, exposition) — draw on different constellations of lexicogrammatical resources and that the demand for more academic register features increases as students move from personal to factual and analytical genres. From a historical perspective, academic language has also undergone a dramatic shift over the past 300 years from the elaborated clausal style (i.e., sentence consisting of multiple clauses) to the compressed phrasal style (i.e., sentence consisting of long noun phrases linked by a verb) (Biber & Gray, 2016). The variation in the way language is used across academic disciplines, tasks, and contexts suggests that academic language is perhaps better referred to as "academic languages" or "academic registers", for there are as many forms and functions of academic language as there are academic texts.
Despite registerial differences in how scholars from different cultural, historical, social, and academic backgrounds write, there seems to be something to their writing that renders it academic. That "something" has been unpacked by corpus and functional linguists (e.g., Biber & Gray, 2016; Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Hyland, 2004; Schleppegrell, 2004), who show that academic writing has certain features that make it distinct from other varieties of writing. These features may be found sporadically in everyday writing, but they tend to appear with higher frequency and heavier concentration in the texts used for academic and disciplinary purposes. Key features of academic writing include, but are not limited to, technicality, density, abstraction, objectivity, formality, and rigor. They are interconnected in the sense that a text with a high degree of, for example, density and objectivity, also tends to have a high degree of abstraction and formality. These features are discussed below, together with the linguistic markers that realize or instantiate them.
7.2.1 Technicality
Academic writing is usually about specialized topics in academic disciplines. As such, it tends to be technical in that it uses specialized terminology to present non-commonsensical knowledge in the discipline. One type of specialized terminology is technical vocabulary, which consists of words, acronyms, and phrases that experts use to encode key concepts in the discipline (e.g., trapezoid, rectangular prism, and tangent in geometry). These terms are essential to the production and organization of specialized knowledge in the discipline. In other words, they are what constitutes the discipline. Another type of specialized terminology is commonplace words and phrases that take on special meaning in particular contexts or disciplines (e.g., volume, surface, area in geometry). These terms are usually orthographically familiar to students because of their high utility in the everyday context, but they have specific meanings in the disciplinary context of their use.
7.2.2 Density
Unlike everyday writing that often focuses on people/animals and their actions and feelings, academic writing typically focuses on concepts/ideas and their relations. As such, it is generally loaded with information, meaning that it has a higher informational density than everyday writing. Usually, the more academic a piece of writing is, the higher its lexical density and the lower its grammatical intricacy. As noted in Chapter 4, lexical density is the ratio of the number of lexical items (i.e., content words) over the number of non-embedded clauses. Text 7-1A, for example, contains 26 content words in 2 clauses, yielding a lexical density score of 13. By contrast, Text 7-1B contains 29 content words in 9 clauses, yielding a lexical density score of 3.2. As the comparison shows, lexical density is achieved primarily through the use of long noun phrases within the clause structure. This is the main reason that academic writing, which features nominalized syntax, tends to be lexically dense.
7.2.3 Abstraction
Another feature of academic writing is that it tends to be more abstract than everyday writing. Three kinds of abstraction are relevant here. One is generic abstraction, which results from the use of nouns that refer to groups of people (e.g., Southerners, workers), classes of things (e.g., reptiles, factories, white-collar crimes), or other entities without perceptual correlates (e.g., financial market, literacy research, notion). These nouns are abstract in the sense that they do not refer to concrete entities in our physical world.
The second kind is technical abstraction, which results from the use of specialized terminology with discipline-specific meanings and often has to be linguistically defined. As discussed earlier, these terms construe non-commonsensical knowledge, which represents more theorized — and thus abstract — interpretations of human experience with the environment. For example, an academic text on weather likely uses technical terms such as precipitation and asperatus, whereas an everyday text on the same topic tends to use vernacular terms such as rain and cloud. Precipitation and aspertus are conceptually more abstract than, respectively, rain and cloud.
The third, and more significant, kind of abstraction is metaphoric abstraction, which results from the use of nominalizations. As discussed in Chapter 2, nominalization refers to the use of, as well as the process of creating, noun that derives from verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, auxiliary verb or clause. Words like transformation, flexibility, frequency, reason, prospect and situation are considered nominalizations because they derive from, respectively, transform (verb), flexible (adjective), frequently (adverb), because (conjunction), will (auxiliary verb) and the fighting continued on the street (clause).
A kind of grammatical metaphor, nominalization is a key resource for abstraction and generalization. It takes away the discursive immediacy and vitality and transforms them into a stasis that is detached from concrete happenings. With every nominalization, the agency is buried, concrete referential information is eliminated, and readers are taken further away from the concrete happenings of everyday life. This has the effect of creating something that is remote, abstract, and agentless. Because nominalization obscures actions, agents performing these actions, and relationships among participants, it is a grammatical resource often manipulated by disciplinary experts in their meaning making.
7.2.4 Objectivity
Academic writing foregrounds ideas/arguments and backgrounds the author. What readers of academic writing are interested in is not so much what we (the author) "think" or "believe" but what information, idea, or evidence we have presented that helps build up our argument or leads to our conclusion. This means that any reference to the author's mental processes (I think, we believe, in my humble opinion) is minimized in academic writing. Thus, instead of saying Right now I am thinking that she was just born smart because she was educated at home most of her life, a more academic way of writing would be She was likely born smart because she was educated at home most of her life. Similarly, rather than saying In my humble opinion, proficiency with informational text is key to school success, it suffices to simply say Proficiency with informational text is key to school success because the statement is presumed to come from the author, unless a reference is provided at the end of the statement. Thus, when we write There is now considerable research evidence suggesting that children face challenges when reading informational text, the reader presumes that it is what we, the author, believe, think, or take to be true. There is no need to put I think, I believe or I affirm at the beginning of the sentence.
Another way to background the author's thinking and feeling is through the use of passive voice. Passive voice enables the author to elide agency when needed. For example, when we do not want/need to explicitly mention ourselves (or others) as the ones who believe or think, we can simply say It is believed that arson is not the cause of the fire that destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or Arson is not believed to be the cause of the fire that destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. In so doing, we position our readers to focus on the concepts and ideas in the sentence rather than on the author or some other unidentified/unidentifiable source who has this belief.
Another aspect of objectivity is that we do not want to sound biased. Instead, we need to reason through evidence in order to arrive at a conclusion or make a statement/argument. Like any other type of writing, academic writing is done by people. As human beings, we all have emotions, pet perspectives, and biases. As scholars, we may be particularly invested in a particular idea, technique, approach, perspective, theory, or ideology. Thus, every piece of academic writing has, admittedly, some personal and emotional elements in it. However, in academic writing, such biases are often conveyed subtly and in a measured way. In other words, we need to avoid sounding subjective or pompous, for arguments in academic writing are built through logical reasoning and supporting evidence, not emotional appeals. We should, as Alvermann and Reinking (2006) cautioned, manage our emotions, biases, and interpretive preferences carefully in our writing. One way to do this is to acknowledge that there are other perspectives on the issues that we are passionate about and that these perspectives could be just as valid as ours. Another way is to be cautious when making claims or when critiquing others' work. This can be done through the use of cautious language such as hedges (e.g., The study also demonstrates that it is possible to obtain relatively separate measures of implicit and explicit knowledge of L2 grammar. The book seems to be advocating for a fiscal policy that would be detrimental to our national economy.). It is important to bear in mind that we do not need to tear other people down in order to build ourselves up. After all, as Isaac Newton humbly acknowledged in a letter to his rival John Hooke in 1676, our scholarship is built on the shoulders of giants who came before us.
7.2.5 Formality
Academic writing is generally more formal than everyday writing. Formality is achieved through adherence to conventions in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, as well as through the deployment of a constellation of academic language features, such as
· specialized terminology (e.g., molality, nitrogen),
· general academic vocabulary (e.g., evidence, eliminate),
· nominalization (e.g., bombardment, neutralization),
· expanded noun phrase (e.g., the number of oxygen atoms bonded to the atoms connected to the -OH group),
· non-restrictive relative clause (e.g., HNO3 is a strong acid, which means that it is essentially 100% ionized in dilute solutions.),
· logical metaphor (e.g., More than one-fourth of the world's coral reefs have been lost to coastal development.),
· non-finite clause (e.g., The letters pH stands for the French words "pouvoir hydrogene", meaning "hydrogen power".),(https://www.daowen.com)
· appositive (e.g., KOH, the solute in the first solution listed, is a soluble ionic compound and a strong base.),
· impersonal use of passive voice (e.g., Similar calculations can be made for solutions that contain HCI.),
· thematic prominence (e.g., For the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry),
· interruption construction (A third acid classification, based on bonding and structure, includes, as acids, substances that do not contain hydrogen at all.), and
· epistemic hedge (e.g., The analysis indicated that barium appeared to be a result of neutron bombardment of uranium.).
Formality can also be achieved by avoiding or minimizing the use of a range of everyday language features, including
· direct question (e.g., How long have alligators been on earth?),
· exclamation (e.g., Don't mess with them.),
· first or second personal pronoun (e.g., If you look at them they can give you quite a scare.),
· discourse fillers (e.g., Alligators are also incredibly old, like, back to the cretaceous period old.),
· reference to writer's mental processes (e.g., I think that they have webbed feet to help them swim better.),
· run-on sentence (e.g., Also they are amphibian but they like the water better compared to the pictures I took and if they aren't in water they are in swampy areas.),
· pronouns with ambiguous or exophoric referents (e.g., If one was to start chasing you, run in a zig zag because they are very fast running straight.),
· colloquial expression (e.g., This amphibian is highly dangerous but very cool to study.),
· contractions (e.g., can't instead of cannot, isn't instead of is not),
· multiple-word verbs (e.g., put off instead of postpone, run into instead of encounter),
· listing expression (e.g., use of and so on, etc., and so forth when ending a list),
· sentence initial conjunctions (e.g., and, but, also) and conjunctive adverbs (e.g., yet, indeed, again),
· sentence final prepositions (e.g., The mudslide destroyed the house they used to live in.),
· amplificatory noun phrase tag (e.g., They are really precious those alligators.), and
· recapitulatory pronoun (e.g., Alligators they are very popular in Florida.).
It is important to point out that there is no intrinsic merit to these academic or everyday language features; they are, in the words of Myhill (2009), "simply linguistic possibilities available to the writer as tools for shaping text" that serve the specific goals intended by the author (p. 405). In other words, academic language is a network of choices that enables its users to mean in ways expected of them in school. It does not in itself make a text more grammatical or more communicative, but simply more the kind of text teachers expect, schools value, and experts favor.
7.2.6 Rigor
Academic writing is highly scrutinized and is thus more rigorous than everyday writing. As Alvermann and Reinking (2006) noted, writing for academic purposes "needs to be distinctly intense and meticulously slow in attending to every word, phrase, and sentence" (p. 77). Rigor manifests not only in word choices but also in logic of argument. When we write for academic purposes, we make word choices that are more accurate and precise (e.g., Twenty-three out of twenty-eight participants completed the survey on time. vs. Most participants completed the task on time. Emergency funds cannot be misappropriated. vs. Emergency money cannot be misappropriated.).
We also exercise caution when making claims and arguments. We are, in many cases, writing for experts within the field, and so we need to be deferential to their expertise by avoiding making categorical assertions or blunt critique that may be seen as naïve, disrespectful, or arrogant. For example, instead of saying This is a topic that has never been explored before or The book is not useful to practitioners, we can say This is a topic that has seldom been explored or The book does not appear to be of much utility to practitioners. According to Aull and Lancaster (2014), advanced academic writing generally "privileges caution, possibility, and delimited claims over certainty" (p. 164), whereas less mature academic writing tends to use more intensifying boosters (e.g., very, really, definitely, a lot, much, extremely, clearly, without doubt, obviously, totally) that achieve the opposite kind of stance. Indeed, many students find it daunting to present claims that are proportionate to evidence or reasonable assumption (Hyland & Milton, 1997).
Another aspect of rigor relates to the logic of argument or presentation of information. Everyday writing features a linear, or horizontal, structure. Its sentences are often strung together haphazardly, with little or no conceptual ordering of any particular kind. Academic writing, on the other hand, is often hierarchically and tightly structured. An idea or argument is presented and then restated, clarified, and explained. Each paragraph (or section) in the text starts with a topic sentence that is subsequently elaborated or supported with evidence or examples. The examples or evidence provided are expected to be both relevant and credible, and the logical connection between the thesis/claim and supporting evidence is expected to be clear and coherent. As Graff and Birkenstein (2018) observed, the best sentence or paragraph is one that is informed by the previous sentence (s)/paragraph (s) and at the same time enables readers to predict what the next sentence (s)/paragraph (s) will be about. This effect can be achieved through a zig-zagging pattern and a reiterating pattern of Thematic progression, as illustrated in Text 7-3 (Cooney, 2000, p. C67). In this text, the Themes of the second, third, fourth, sixth, and seventh sentences (the burning of trash, the trucks that haul trash to landfills, and even the landfills themselves; to reduce air pollution; well-tuned cars; modern cars; many industries) pick up a part of the Rhemes in the first, second, third, fifth, and sixth sentences (the amount of trash that must be burned or hauled to landfills; air pollution; keep their cars well tuned; more modern, fuel efficient ones that pollute less; built), respectively, and make them the subjects of subsequent discussion. The Themes of the eighth and ninth sentences (some, others) repeat the Theme of the seventh sentence (many industries).
Text 7-3
(1) Recycling, along with reducing and reusing, also reduces the amount of trash that must be burned or hauled to landfills. (2) The burning of trash, the trucks that haul trash to landfills, and even the landfills themselves all cause air pollution. (3) To reduce air pollution, many people keep their cars well tuned. (4) Well-tuned cars use gas more efficiently and produce fewer pollutants. (5) As older cars wear out, many people replace them with more modern, fuel efficient ones that pollute less. (6) Modern cars produce 95% less pollution than cars built 30 years ago. (7) Many industries are working to reduce air pollution. (8) Some find ways to reduce the amount of energy they use. (9) Others reduce air pollution by changing how they make things.