English Academic writing and presentations - Writing

Academic writing

Introduction

Objectives
The purpose of this unit is to help you communicate more effectively in a formal academic writing style. In order to hone these skills, you will need to be more aware of the differences between academic writing and informal other (less formal) types of written and spoken communication. Upon completing these exercises, you should be able to recognize and use a fair number of phrases, collocations, and grammatical structures commonly found in academic papers.

Grammar topics

• “If” sentences
• Passive voice

Questions for discussion / reflection

• Academic writing is often regarded as dry, boring and humorless. Does that necessarily have to be the case?
• Where might you need academic English in your life (actively/passively)?

Written assignment
Write a brief essay in which you attempt to refute an author’s arguments (using logic, conflicting evidence, etc.). Ideally, you should use an academic paper or journal article as the basis for your work, but an article from a high-quality newspaper or magazine will also be acceptable. Remember to use formal academic style throughout the paper, including transitions (linking words) and a logical structure.
Maximum length: 2 pages (1-spaced; 12-point font) Please submit your paper in Word format via the Moodle platform and start the file name with your last name (e.g., “Smith_Paper.doc”).
If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message.

Academic style

The purpose of this section is to sensitize you to (or simply remind you of) the differences between academic writing and less formal types of communication. One important thing to remember is that it’s not always necessary to use long words or to write long, complicated sentences in order for an English text to sound formal and academic. It is far more important to ensure that your writing is clear and precise.

Sample text
Read the following excerpt from the introduction to “Trust and Privacy Concern Within Social Networking Sites: A Comparison of Facebook and MySpace” (Dwyer, Hiltz and Passerin, 2007):

Social networking sites are a type of virtual community that has grown tremendously in popularity over the past few years. The social networking site MySpace ranks sixth in overall web traffic, with over 47 million unique US visitors each month (QuantCast, 2007b). The web traffic data for Facebook, a social networking site oriented towards college students, shows 15 million unique US visitors a month (QuantCast, 2007a).

When people join social networking sites, they begin by creating a profile, then make connections to existing friends as well as those they meet through the site. A profile is a list of identifying information. It can include your real name, or a pseudonym. It also can include photographs, birthday, hometown, religion, ethnicity, and personal interest. Members connect to others by sending a “friend” message, which must be accepted by the other party in order to establish a link. “Friending” another member gives them access to your profile, adds them to your social network, and vice versa.

Members use these sites for a number of purposes. The root motivation is communication and maintaining relationships. Popular activities include updating others on activities and whereabouts, sharing photos and archiving events, getting updates on activities by friends, displaying a large social network, presenting an idealized persona, sending messages privately, and posting public testimonials. This paper describes a study of the impact of trust and internet privacy concern on the use of social networking sites for social interaction. It begins with a summary of relevant research related to social networking sites. The online survey methodology is described and the results presented, followed by limitations and conclusions.

Discussion questions

• How would you describe the language used in the text? What specific characteristics can you find to justify your description?
• Can you identify any specific phrases which are typical of this kind of writing?

Comprehension exercise
Can you find more common, everyday equivalents for the following words and expressions? How would you express these ideas when chatting with a friend?

1. has grown tremendously in popularity
2. a social networking site oriented towards college students
3. The root motivation
4. presenting an idealized persona
5. trust and internet privacy concern

Vocabulary

to make a connection
nickname / fake name
to keep in touch
current location

Now look at the text below, which was taken from a news magazine.

Six Social-Networking Lies Admit it: You’re lying to yourself about why you use Facebook, or any of its myriad kin. Debunking the top social-networking delusions:

1. I only friend people I know. Stop pretending you have standards. You will friend anyone. I accept all sorts of people I haven’t seen in 20 years and couldn’t pick out of a line-up.

2. Facebook flirting isn’t cheating. Stop sending your assistant cute virtual gifts. In fact, it’s not appropriate for you to be friending her, or that cute summer intern, in the first place.

3. I use Facebook to keep in touch with people. No, the truth is you’re nosy. We scour the profiles of people because we want to know their shameful business. The oversharing thrills us.

4. I’m so over Facebook. I’m not falling for that ironic distancing pose. I know you spend hours looking for former girlfriends, or that guy from your freshman psychology class. I tried to act all Margaret Mead when I first joined (“It’s a classic example of mass hysteria, inspired by our collective need to be famous, blah, blah”) But everybody knew I wasn’t there to do social anthropology.

5. And I am so not competitive. We don’t just want more friends than everybody else; we also want the highest score in Word Twist or Scramble because we can hide the self-satisfied smirk behind the Internet. By the way, if your Scramble score is higher than 147, don’t even think about friending me.

6. Facebook is my friend. Let’s get this straight: Facebook is a business (albeit one that has yet to make money.) Just as casinos hide the exits and pump oxygen into the air to keep you gambling, Facebook wants you to linger within its dotcom walls so that it can attract advertisers to target your dazed little eyes.

Source: Newsweek, March 14, 2009

Task
What differences can you identify in the language and style used?     

Academic paper

Newsweek column

Useful expressions

This is just a selection of the possible expressions you might find in academic papers and journal articles. When doing research, you should also remember to pay attention to the language and to look for other typical elements of this writing style.
Citing arguments from other authors

• Anderson (2009) argues that …
• … , as argued by Wesson (2007).
• According to James (2009), …
• Bernard (2008) states that …
• Referring (back) to Matthews (2009), we argue that …
• Kowalski (2009) points out that …
• Heller (2009) explains …
• … reveals …
• … summarizes the problem as follows:
• … pinpoints / identifies a number of factors …
• … outlines the main reasons for …
• Pendleton (2009) focuses on …
• Donaldson (2009) claims that …
• Jones (2009) maintains that …
• … asserts that …
• Masterson (2009) suggests that the model might be flawed.
• …presents a number of arguments against / in favor of …
• Peters (2008) concludes that …
• Yo (2004) comes to the conclusion that …
• Jolie and Voight (2008) develop a model/theory/hypothesis which describes …
• In his 2009 essay, Pitt declares that “[t]he world as we know it has changed irreversibly.”
• Sovich (2007) comments that …
• O’Connor (2008) also mentions the positive effects of …
• … the  “AXE” effect, as mentioned in Matheson et al. (2009).
• As Bauer (2009) mentions, …
• Many researchers believe that…
• Although many researchers, including X (2009) and Y (2008), contend that ...

Refuting arguments / disagreeing

• The authors’ assertion/argument/theory has been refuted/disproven by …
• However, those authors fail to prove their hypothesis because ….
• Unfortunately, it appears that the authors misinterpreted the available data, as …
• However, their theory does not hold up in the context of small business management.
• The theory is not applicable in practice (but: applicable to other groups, etc.).
• However, those authors appear to have made an error in their analysis.
• …, the logic of their argument is flawed, as …
• …, that argument is incomplete / out of date.
• …, the authors seem to have overlooked a number of key points.
• …, their analysis contains a number of errors.
• …, the facts indicate that their results / findings are inaccurate / outdated / skewed / distorted (softer version: not entirely correct / not quite accurate).
• … more recent studies have shown / revealed …
• Based on other studies, their hypotheses must be rejected due to …

(to reject a hypothesis)

• Their line of argumentation fails to account for ….

Academic writing exercises

Informal vs. formal language

Rewrite the following sentences in a more formal style

1. Smith and some of his colleagues did a study on this thing back in 1997.
2. Over the last couple of years, the city has tried hard to make itself more attractive to new businesses.
3. So this type of business model is not only good for startups, it can also help more established companies.
4. Large amounts of business people would be interested in this program.
5. Here’s a table with the amazing results of our experiment:
6. Some people really want to be good to the environment, so tons of companies are now trying to cash in on the trend.
7. People haven’t really paid much attention to it, but it’s a totally important area of research.
8. I checked out the statistics and decided that they seemed pretty reliable.
9. We used the model in the exact same way for all of the companies we looked at.
10. This made us think there might be something wrong with our model.

Improving on “things”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the word “thing,” but it can often be rather informal and vague. In many cases, you can use a more suitable or specific word to express what you mean. Can you think of a better word for “things” in the following sentences?

1. The things we will cover in this paper are ...
2. The things that have been done to improve the situation are ...
3. We had to order various things for the office.
4. I agree with you on that thing.
5. I left all my things at the hotel.
6. What are the other things on the agenda?
7. We will have to take a number of things into account.
8. What things do you manufacture?
9. I feel I should highlight one thing in particular: ...

Key language and grammar exercises

This section covers two important grammar topics relevant to academic writing: “if” sentences and the passive voice.

“If” sentences

Study the following examples of “if” sentences:

a) If you publish, you do so at your own risk.

b) If their findings are robust, their work will come as a shock to the scientific community.

c) If they examined all three sub-samples at once, they would come to far more meaningful conclusions.

d) If we had the equipment, we would conduct the experiment again. e) If they had demonstrated this effect across all groups, the results would have been very surprising.

NB: c) and d) use the same verb forms (past form + would).

Questions

• Which one describes a situation in which something didn’t happen?
• Which one is a general statement which suggests that something is “always true”?
• Which one refers to a situation in which something isn’t true or isn’t the case?
• Two of the sentences refer to something that could happen. In which sentence is it less probable?

Finally, have a look at the “mixed” example below. Which two forms (see above) are combined here?

f) If the authors had done their work more carefully, they would be happier now.

Write a sentence using “if” for each situation

1. The equipment is very expensive, so most researchers are unable to afford it.
2. Their research is highly controversial, which is why they don’t receive much funding from the private sector.
3. He was not in the office last week, so he has not replied to your request.
4. I was certain of the results, so I didn’t bother to run the test again.
5. The server crashed a few minutes ago; that’s why you can’t access your account online.

.

Passive voice

In English, the passive voice is often used in academic writing as a way to focus on the action itself rather than the people or other subjects involved. It is used very often in cases a) where you don’t know who did something, b) where it’s not considered important to indicate who did it, or c) where you wish to avoid mentioning the subject (i.e., the pronoun “I” in a paper or report, or in order to avoid direct accusations). One caveat: Overusing the passive voice is often considered poor style, and the reader could easily become confused about who actually did (or does) what. As a rule of thumb, it is probably best to use the passive voice only in the cases listed above, or in situations where you cannot think of a reasonable expression in the active voice.

Examples

• The guidelines are approved by the Ethics Committee every year.
• The sample was divided into three sub-samples.
• A number of conclusions can be drawn from these findings.
• In light of the previous study’s results, a closer correlation should have been found.

Task
Read the excerpt from Dwyer, Hiltz and Passerin (2007) again and look for instances of the passive voice. How many examples can you find? How do the authors manage to avoid using both passive constructions and “I” / “we”?

Passive: Fill in the blanks

1. Is the network up and running? No, it                               repaired.
2. As her research track record is excellent, she expects                              promoted.
3. Those authors                               accused of plagiarism last year.
4. In the past week, three of his papers                               accepted for publication in respected journals.
5. The decision had to                               taken unanimously.
6. The conference                               held at the same place every year.
7. Quite a lot of changes                               made to the paper.
8. The paper                     submitted yesterday.

Passive: Transformation exercise
Put these sentences into the passive voice, omitting the phrase “by X“ wherever appropriate.

1. The authors instructed the survey participants to assign ratings on a scale of 1 to 5.

2. Right now the research assistants are interviewing the first respondent.

3. We held a raffle in order to encourage people to fill out the questionnaire.

4. The authors had to reject the hypothesis because the results were not significant.

5. They repeated the study with a larger sample.

Additional exercises

More practice with linkers
Linkers: Matching
Link the statements in column B with those in column A.

1)Heathrow is Europe’s most modern airport	Furthermore, it may be addictive.
2)I would like to spend more time with my family.	However, it is severely congested.
3)The drug has powerful side effects.	Moreover, competition in the US and Europe is increasing.
4)The weak demand for our products in the domestic market and in Asia hit us harder than we expected.	On the other hand, it did give me first-hand experience of factory work.
5)She’s been under a lot of pressure recently.	I have therefore decided to resign as chairman.
6)I didn’t enjoy the time I spent on the production line	As a result, she’s decided to take time off to relax a little.

Spot the errors
Can you find the errors in the sentences below?

1. Managers and scientists are occupied with the issue of job satisfaction since decades.
2. They discussed the possibility to use this great innovation.
3. Examples for this new developments include Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Irregular verbs
Fill in the missing forms of the following verbs

German	Infinitive	Past tense	Past participle
(wachsen)
	show
		arose
			begun

Prepositions

1. The population has grown rapidly                               size.
2. These changes have had a lasting impact                               the firm’s quality of service.
3. The company ranks sixth                               terms of revenues.
4. They were absolutely certain                               their results.
5. Between 1993 and 1997, a rapid increase                               penetration was observed.
6. In the last year, the number has increased                               37% (i.e., from 200 to 274).
7. These new policies have had a marked effect                               customer relations.

Pronunciation check
Can you pronounce the following words correctly?

• lose
• major
• mechanism
• recession
• loose
• mayor
• Chicago
• decision