7.3 New Trends in Academic Writing

At least two new trends have been noted in recent discussions of academic writing. One concerns formality. Academic writing is widely perceived to have become more informal and less rigidly objective in recent decades. Empirical research has yielded a more complex picture, however, suggesting that the trend does not necessarily hold true. For example, Hyland and Jiang (2017) examined published articles in academic journals at three periods over a span of 50 years (1965-2015). They reported that while academic writing in hard sciences saw a small increase in the use of informality markers, the social sciences writing actually became slightly more formal. They further noted that the increase in informality markers is mainly restricted to such features as first personal pronouns, unattended reference this, second person pronouns, and sentence initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs. They suggested that these shifts, albeit unremarkable and slow, are indicative of the changing rhetorical practices that are responsive to emerging communicative demands as authors in many disciplines are now more willing to embrace "a more direct and egalitarian relationship" with readers in order to engage and persuade them (p. 49).

Similarly, Biber and Gray (2010) shows that academic writing has not changed historically to become more speech-like or less formal. That is, there is not a general shift to more colloquial styles. They acknowledged that although authors of modern academic prose do use the first person pronouns I and we to refer directly to themselves or imperative constructions that assume the existence of a specific addressee more often than do their predecessors, this historical change is minor in comparison to the pervasive change to a compressed nominal or phrasal style. These findings, together with those of others (e.g., Gamson, Lu & Eckert, 2013), show that academic writing has remained largely formal over the past 50 or more years, with small increases in markers of formality (e.g., proportions of nouns and adjectives in relation to verbs and pronouns) and density (e.g., compressed phrasal expressions over elaborated clausal expressions). This trend suggests that formality is likely "an underlying constant" of academic writing (Hyland & Jiang, 2017, p. 48) because it is necessary for construing precision and informativity and for avoiding ambiguity and misinterpretation. Biber and Gray (2010) surmised that formal styles allow for more efficient processing of texts, as expert readers can quickly extract large amounts of information from relatively short, condense texts. On the other hand, however, these styles pose difficulties for novice readers (e.g., students), who must learn to infer unspecified meaning relations among grammatical constituents with much less content knowledge than experts.

Another trend in academic writing is that it has become increasingly multimodal and multisemiotic. That is, texts in academic and disciplinary contexts often integrate the visual (image) and the verbal (language) (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). In fact, texts in some academic disciplines, such as science and mathematics, are almost never purely verbal and in many instances predominantly visual. According to Lemke (2002), for example, the literate practices of professional scientists are "normally conducted in multimedia genres where meanings are made by integrating the semiotic resources of language, mathematics, and a variety of visual-graphical presentations" (p. 21). Modern science texts contain "not just words in sentences and paragraphs, but tables, charts, diagrams, graphs, maps, drawings, photographs, and a host of specialized visual representations from acoustical sonograms to chromatography strips and gene maps" (Lemke, 2002, p. 24). The popularity of multimedia in academic writing is due in part to the limitations of language itself and in part to the affordances of new technologies. Although language is a powerful tool for classification and conceptualization, it is not very good at describing "the quantitative covariation of continuously variable phenomena" such as shapes, color, temperature, velocity, angle, voltage, concentration, and mass, for which visual and spatial-motor representations are better suited (Lemke, 2002, p. 27). At the same time, advances in word processing, graphing, and other desktop publishing software provide writers with a wide range of tools that make multimodal and multisemiotic representations not only possible but increasingly easy.(https://www.daowen.com)

The advent of new representational resources presents new challenges for writers, who must now be able to design meaning by constructing multimodally coherent texts that conform to disciplinary norms and are effective for communication. More specifically, writers must learn to integrate multiple media simultaneously and seamlessly and to reinterpret and recontextualize information in one channel/modality in relation to that in other channels/modalities. They need to develop the linguistic, symbolic, visual, and technological resources that enable them to, for example, foreground or background certain information, refer back and forth between the verbal and the visual-symbolic without sounding redundant or incoherent, advance argument, and achieve clarity (Zhang & O'Halloran, 2019). In short, there is no doubt that communication in academic and disciplinary settings is increasingly taking the form of not only natural language but also physical action, material artifacts, and other semiotic tools such as graphs, diagrams, and images. This means students must expand their communicative repertoire by developing familiarity and facility with both linguistic and non-linguistic means of communication.