On the complexity of academic writing
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Bethany Gray
Abstract
Building upon renewed research on the pervasive phrasal or nominal style of academic writing, I investigate the use of phrasal compression and clausal elaboration structures in research articles across six academic disciplines. Results indicate that all disciplines rely on phrasal complexity features to a much greater extent than clausal features. However, these results also show systematic patterns of variation across disciplines, with hard sciences (physics, biology) exhibiting the densest use of phrasal features, followed by social sciences (applied linguistics, political science), and then humanities disciplines (history, philosophy). Furthermore, the patterns for clausal features displayed the opposite trend: most frequent in humanities and least frequent in hard sciences. Keywords: Complexity; clausal elaboration; phrasal compression; disciplinary writing; informational discourse; research articles
Abstract
Building upon renewed research on the pervasive phrasal or nominal style of academic writing, I investigate the use of phrasal compression and clausal elaboration structures in research articles across six academic disciplines. Results indicate that all disciplines rely on phrasal complexity features to a much greater extent than clausal features. However, these results also show systematic patterns of variation across disciplines, with hard sciences (physics, biology) exhibiting the densest use of phrasal features, followed by social sciences (applied linguistics, political science), and then humanities disciplines (history, philosophy). Furthermore, the patterns for clausal features displayed the opposite trend: most frequent in humanities and least frequent in hard sciences. Keywords: Complexity; clausal elaboration; phrasal compression; disciplinary writing; informational discourse; research articles
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of Contributors vii
- Foreword ix
-
Introduction
- Douglas Biber and the Flagstaff School of corpus-based research xv
- A corpus-based analysis of linguistic variation in teacher and student presentations in university settings 1
- Telephone interactions 25
- On the complexity of academic writing 49
- Telling by omission 79
- Corpora, context, and language teachers 99
- The challenge of constructing a reliable word list: An exploratory corpus-based analysis of lexical variability in introductory Psychology textbooks 123
- Corpus linguistics and New Englishes 147
- Investigating textual borrowing in academic discourse 177
- Situating lexical bundles in the formulaic language spectrum 197
- Index 217
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of Contributors vii
- Foreword ix
-
Introduction
- Douglas Biber and the Flagstaff School of corpus-based research xv
- A corpus-based analysis of linguistic variation in teacher and student presentations in university settings 1
- Telephone interactions 25
- On the complexity of academic writing 49
- Telling by omission 79
- Corpora, context, and language teachers 99
- The challenge of constructing a reliable word list: An exploratory corpus-based analysis of lexical variability in introductory Psychology textbooks 123
- Corpus linguistics and New Englishes 147
- Investigating textual borrowing in academic discourse 177
- Situating lexical bundles in the formulaic language spectrum 197
- Index 217
