Academic writing: Analysis of discourse conventions

Academic writing embodies a set of conventions within discourse that aim to understand and to write pieces of written language precisely. According to Pintos and Crimi (2010, p.9), “academic writing is one of the big steps towards advanced literacy” which can be seen as a resource to increase the growth of ideas through sophisticated thinking. Silva (as cited in Pintos and Crimi 2010, p.11) outlines the importance of conceiving academic writing as a tool for “[socializing] the students into the academic context”. However, this type of writing in professional settings cannot be acquired but learnt; in other words, qualified writers should have followed a number of conventions that rule this principle in order to be experts in this field.

Pintos and Crimi (2010) state that discourse conventions include, among others, omissions and insertion of words and/or letters. Firstly, ellipses are used to show that a part of a text in a quotation has been excluded. A rule about ellipses embraces “[a] part of a text that has been edited out” (Ibid.), for example, Myles’ (2002) paper on Second Language Writing and Research quotes Swales’ (1990) words as “[writing] should not be viewed solely as an individually-oriented, inner-directed cognitive process, but as much as an acquired response to discourse conventions . . . within particular communities”. Secondly, insertions use square brackets to incorporate words or letters in the original quotation, for instance, “[A] thought we should not cripple our students’ interest in writing (…)” (Myles, 2002, para.5). Acknowledging sources, like In-text citations, are also part of the ruling concepts of academic writing. Pintos and Crimi (2010, p. 19) outline that “every single citation (. . .) should be mentioned in [a] reference list [thus] every single resource that has been included in the reference list should appear in the body of the paper”. In other words, in-text citations are used to give credit to somebody else’s words in order to avoid plagiarism; they include parenthetical citations such as “[the emphasis is placed on] students’ strategic knowledge and the ability of students to transform information . . . to meet rhetorically constrained purposes (Grabe & Kaplab, 1996, p. 116)” (Myles, Ibid.) Paraphrased citations entail transmitting a message or a thought without using the same words that an author might have applied before. This type of citations includes the author’s surname and the year of publication between brackets, for instance, “although L2 writing is strategically, rhetorically, and linguistically different in many ways from L1 writing (Silva, 1993)” (Myles, Ibid.).

Working with in-text citations implies searching for interesting and precise words in order to “help [writers] vary structures and vocabulary” (Pintos and Crimi, 2010, p.18) this group of words is known as reporting verbs. A reporting verb list include affirm, assume, describe, explain, state, and suggest among others but it is important to look for their meanings beforehand in order to avoid misunderstanding since they should imply some kind of evaluative thinking. For example “Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) have stressed the benefit of process approaches to writing instruction and the need for more knowledge-transforming tasks” (Myles 2002).

To conclude, academic writers are requested to follow a number of rules to communicate their thoughts and to generate knowledge in every single field of skilled activity. Thus, academic writing is thought to have an objective: Creation of new knowledge in different professional settings.

References

Mile, J. (2002). Second Language Writing and Research: The writing process and error analysis in student texts. TESEL-EJ, 6, 2, 2002. Queen’s University. Retrieved November 13 from http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESl-EJ/ej22/a1.html

Pintos, V. & Crimi, Y. (2010). Academic writing. CAECE University. Retrieved November 12 from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=7392