E-Book, Englisch, 528 Seiten
E-Book, Englisch, 528 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-8463-5658-6
Verlag: UTB
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Hinweise zur Verwendung neuer Internet-Technologien.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Prefaces
Introduction
Module I Organizing ideas into text
Introduction
Chapter 1 The term paper: gearing up to start writing
1.1 The term paper as an argued text
1.2 The three processes of planning, writing proper and editing
1.3 Making the plan
1.4 Using a computer
1.5 Conclusion
Chapter 2 Different types of term paper: Two models
2.1 Term paper as essay or as mini-article
2.2 Quotation and paraphrase
2.3 The literary essay
2.4 The linguistic mini-article
2.5 Conclusion
Chapter 3 Title, Introduction, Body and Conclusion
3.1 The Title
3.2 The Introduction
3.3 The Body sections
3.4 Paragraphs within the Body sections
3.5 The Conclusion
Chapter 4 Getting the paper ready for submission: Editing and formatting
4.1 Editing
4.2 Formal requirements
Bibliography
Module II Building effective sentences
Introduction
Chapter 1 Basic issues in sentence construction
1.1 Sentence construction
1.2 Information packaging
1.3 Sentencing
1.4 Overview
Chapter 2 Information packaging
2.1 Basic grammatical moulds
2.2 The order of information in the clause
2.3 Organizing the starting point
2.4 Establishing a special kind of starting point: framing
2.5 Organizing the end point
2.6 What goes wrong in clause construction
2.7 Overview
Chapter 3 Complex sentences
3.1 Different kinds of sentence
3.2 Clause combining: the basic forms
3.3 Foregrounding and backgrounding
3.4 Complex framing
3.5 Interruption techniques
3.6 Elaborational techniques
3.7 Coordinating and listing
3.8 Problems with sentence length
3.9 Review
Chapter 4 Punctuation
4.1 Commas 1: the principle of semantic unity
4.2 Commas 2: optional use
4.3 Colons
4.4 Semicolons
4.5 Dashes and brackets
4.6 Commas revisited: dealing with comma splices
4.7 Overview
Bibliography
References
Module III Lexis and Grammar
Introduction
Chapter 1 A constructional view of language
Chapter 2 Academic lexis and patterning
2.1 Nouns and noun patterns
2.2 Adjective patterns
2.3 Prepositions and prepositional phrases
2.4 Verbs and verb patterns
2.5 The interface between verb patterning and sentence-building
Chapter 3 From word to collocation
3.1 Words, words, words
3.2 How words go together
3.3 Collocation of semantic-pragmatic features
3.4 Collocational gaps and incompatibilities
3.5 Making creative use of collocation
3.6 The interplay of collocation and patterning
Chapter 4 Rhetorical moves and their lexical realizations
4.1 Stating your topics and objectives
4.2 Reporting, summarizing and paraphrasing
4.3 Expressing opinions and criticizing
4.4 Enumerating ideas and changing the topic
4.5 Topicalizing specific items
4.6 Exemplification
4.7 Comparison and contrast
4.8 Concession
4.9 Cause, reason and explanation
4.10 Consequence and result
4.11 Static relations
Bibliography
Module IV Style
Introduction
Chapter I Style and stylistic competence
1.1 What is style?
1.2 How to achieve stylistic competence
1.3 Academic style
1.4 From non-specialist to specialist text
1.5 Personal style
Chapter 2 The principles of style
2.1 Aptness
2.2 Clarity
2.3 Concision
2.4 Variety
2.5 Elegance
Bibliography
Afterword
Glossary
Index
Preface to the Third Edition
This third edition includes a number of updates and minor corrections to the text of the Second Edition; the text has also been streamlined where necessary. These modifications are designed to take account of new insights that have emerged in the specialist literature. The ten years since the second edition have also seen an accelerated globalization of higher education, and with it a further broadening of the academic discourse community writing in English. This in turn has led to increased interest in the standards that should apply in the assessment of written academic English (cf. Jenkins 2014: Ch.3). Although we acknowledge the movement towards English as a lingua franca in academic settings (ELFA), we continue to support native speaker English as the target model for advanced learner writers. There is as yet insufficient strong evidence that the target norms have changed (cf. for instance Edwards 2016). Finally, in response to the widespread use of the internet by student writers, this edition devotes more attention than its predecessors to internet tools (the electronic workbench) and to plagiarism. July 2021 The authors Preface to the Second Edition
This second edition includes a number of additions to the original text. First, Chapter 3 of Module II has a new Section 8 which describes the basic principles for coordinating and listing pieces of information, as well as presenting solutions for the frequent problems that writers have in this area of sentence construction. Second, Chapter 2.4 of Module III has been expanded to include more material on existential clauses and how to use them. And thirdly, Chapter 3.2 in Module I now highlights the main differences between German-style and English-style introductions. In addition to the new material, references have been updated where necessary and a number of typographical errors have been corrected. The contributions of Hannay and Mackenzie were partially financed by the research project INCITE09 204155 PR (Autonomous Government of Galicia) and FFI2010–19380 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation). July 2011 The authors Preface
One of the most obvious facts about the world we live in is that the written word is everywhere. Every day, more and more people across the globe are being confronted with other people’s writings and are being called upon to produce writing themselves, in their private lives and above all in their professions. Furthermore, as the internationalization of our world continues, so we all are increasingly being faced with the tasks of reading and producing texts in languages other than our own. In particular, the dominant role of English in global communication makes it essential that skill in writing English should be part of the stock-in-trade of all educated people, wherever they live. At German-speaking universities, most departments understandably demand that written work should be submitted in German: this places fewest communicative barriers between teachers and students and also fosters the German language as a medium of scholarly discussion. In departments of English and in a growing number of science faculties, however, students are being required to do an increasing amount of their written work in English, and other departments outside the Arts faculties, too, are gradually coming to accept work submitted in English. This development may arise from a desire to train German-speaking students to practise communicating in the academic lingua franca or it may form a response to the growing number of visiting students from other countries whose German is not yet sufficient for academic writing. It is to all students who need to write term papers in English, for whatever reason, that this book is primarily addressed. We trust that it will also be of assistance to senior academics who wish to publish in English. Last but not least, it may offer fresh insights to professional writers and editors as well as to teachers and students in the senior years of the Gymnasium (grammar school). The reader may justifiably wonder what is new about this book. After all, there is already a plethora of style guides, composition textbooks and self-help Internet sites giving advice on professional or academic writing in English. This book is different in at least two respects. Firstly, while we do offer advice on how to write effectively, our advice is not based on any prescriptive notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ text. Rather, we attempt to offer objective insights into those features of English academic text that may pose problems for the German-speaking writer of English. To take just one example, some style guides intended for native speakers set out fairly rigid rules on nominalization, claiming that texts will be easier to understand if the writer uses as few nominalizations as possible. However, as close observation of academic text will show, the situation is far more complex. One reason is that nominalization is a standard feature of academic language; this is just as true for English as for any other European language. As a result, budding academic writers who are anxious to join the academic community have no alternative but to use nominalizations in conformity with academic norms. Another reason is that the choice between a nominal and a verbal construction often depends on context. In the following sentence, for example, the noun supersession is clearly preferable to its verbal equivalent supersede, whose use would make the sentence far longer and more complex. This is because the verbs advocate and expect take different complements (e.g. advocate that + subjunctive, expect that + will-future): Most of those who advocate or expect the supersession of capitalism by socialism have a strong sympathy with the idea of socialism and, indeed, call themselves socialists. (Robinson 1980: 141) Similar observations could be made about countless other points we discuss in this book. In each case, rather than providing prescriptive rules, we aim to provide strategies and exercises designed to help our readers cope with the twin demands of effectiveness and conformity to discoursal norms. The assumption throughout is that a reader who has insight into language, and more specifically into the interplay between function and form, will be able to make the right choices at any particular juncture in a text. Intimately connected with this is a second feature that sets Writing in English apart from general textbooks on writing: it is geared specifically towards the needs of German-speaking readers. We base all our observations on authentic student and native-speaker texts from various sources, some of them electronic, and we draw on a wide range of research literature, some of which deals with cross-linguistic and cross-cultural difference. We are confident that this corpus-driven approach has allowed us to describe deviation and error in students’ interlanguage with greater precision than is the case in textbooks which are aimed at a more general audience. In this sense, the present book will be helpful not only to non-native writers, but also to native editors struggling to correct fully formulated texts submitted by German-speaking authors. It may appear from the foregoing that this book adheres to what Lea and Street (2000) have dismissively dubbed the ‘study skills’ methodology rather than the, to them less reprehensible, ‘academic socialization’ and ‘academic literacy’ approaches. According to Lea and Street, the study skills methodology focuses on “attempts to ‘fix’ problems with student learning” and treats these as “a kind of pathology”. However, we have no qualms about drawing our readers’ attention to ‘surface features’ like appropriate text structure and grammar because, as Raimes (1983, quoted in Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 31) puts it, “many of our students … cry out for rules, for something concrete to monitor their performance with”. What Lea and Street seem to forget is that many advanced second-language writers already have a reasonable command of general writing strategies in their first language and that these usually transfer positively to the second language (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 241). Their main worry, therefore, is not the assertion of their ‘identity’ in the teacher-learner relationship. What they are really concerned about is the fact that they cannot attain ‘writing power’ and cannot become members of the academic discourse community before they have mastered the rudiments of their second language, any more than in traditional societies an apprentice was able to wield influence within his guild before becoming a master craftsman. Part of any induction into a community (in our case, the community of academic writers in English) involves learning the ropes and discovering what is allowed and what is...
