Useful requirements to write academically

Useful requirements to write academically

Readers will have the opportunity to analyze what is needed to write academically. Therefore, they will be able to find four aspects related to academic writing: the use of quotations, omissions, and insertions of words or letters; introductory phrases and their structure; in-text citations and their most common structures; and the use of reporting verbs (Pintos, 2008).
In the first place, omissions are used in writing to show that a particular part on the original text has been omitted. When parts of a sentence, no more than a sentence, are edited out, three full stops are used in place of the omitted part. For example, “writing should not be viewed solely as an individually-oriented, inner-directed cognitive process, but as much as an acquired response to the discourse conventions . . . within particular communities” (Myles, 2002, p.3).
Furthermore, if at least one paragraph is omitted, another paragraph is written, then four full stops in the following margin are added, and the other paragraph on the margin is written below. Moreover, if a whole sentence is edited out, the authors make the text and they use three full stops between brackets, such as text (…) (Pintos, 2008).
Apart from omitting words, phrases, sentences or even paragraphs in a text, these last ones could be inserted into the original quotation. Therefore, whenever a particular author’s words are quoted, it is necessary to write not only the surname and the year of publication, but also the page in which the original quotation was found (Pintos, 2008).
One example of both, quotation and insertion is the following one: “According to McLaughlin, transfer errors can occur because: [L]earners lack the necessary information in the second language or the attentional capacity to activate the appropriate second-language routine. But such an account says little about why certain linguistic forms transfer and other do not” (Myles, 2002, p. 7).
According to Pintos (2008), there are many ways of writing introductory phrases. They can be included as In X’s (year of publication) article, X’s (year of publication) paper on … discusses, according to X (year of publication), or X (year of publication) states that… . In Myles’ (2002) article, there are some examples, such as Flower and her colleagues (1990) analyze… (p. 3), Schumann (1998) argues that … (p. 7), or According to Ellis (1985), … (p. 9).
Additionally, whenever authors cite other authors’ works, they have to use in-text citations. This is done by using the reporting verbs in the past tense or the present perfect tense, with the purpose of signaling phrases described in earlier articles. If the author summarizes or paraphrases other writer’s work, it is necessary to include the author’s surname and the year of publication.
However, if the author quotes the actual words of the former one, it is necessary to include the page where it was found (Pintos, 2008). In Myles’ (2002) article, there are many examples of in-text citations: “Knowing how to write a summary or analysis in Mandarin or Spanish does not necessarily mean that students will be able to do these things in English (Kern, 2000)”, “Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) also propose … (p. 354)”.
As regards the use of reporting verbs, there are many different ones in the analyzed text. These verbs are used in order not to repeat the way in-text citations are written. For instance, the verbs focus on, analyze, propose, stress, argue, point out, and mention are used in Myles’ (2002) article.
On balance, academic writing is a useful tool to express thoughts or opinions in academic contexts. However, there are some requirements that writers need to follow in order to write within those contexts. Apart from remembering the specific formal elements which lead to proficiency, the writer has to persuade the reader to analyze what was written. In short, the main purpose of writing academically could be to have a voice to be heard.


References

Myles, 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 September, 12, 2008, from http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESI-EJ/ej22/a1.html

Pintos, V. (2008). Unit 3: Academic writing. Universidad CAECE: Buenos Aires, Argentina. Retrieved September 12, 2008, from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=2725