Demystifying Academic Writing

Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies

Zhihui Fang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Informative, insightful, and accessible, this book is designed to enhance the capacity of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as early career scholars, to write for academic purposes. Fang describes key genres of academic writing, common rhetorical moves associated with each genre, essential skills needed to write the genres, and linguistic resources and strategies that are functional and effective for performing these moves and skills.

Fang's functional linguistic approach to academic writing enables readers to do so much more than write grammatically well-formed sentences. It leverages writing as a process of designing meaning to position language choices as the central focus, illuminating how language is a creative resource for presenting information, developing argument, embedding perspectives, engaging audience, and structuring text across genres and disciplines. Covering reading responses, book reviews, literature reviews, argumentative essays, empirical research articles, grant proposals, and more, this text is an all-in-one resource for building a successful career in academic writing and scholarly publishing.

Each chapter features crafts for effective communication, authentic writing examples, practical applications, and reflective questions. Fang complements these features with self-assessment tools for writers and tips for empowering writers. Assuming no technical knowledge, this text is ideal for both non-native and native English speakers, and suitable for courses in academic writing, rhetoric and composition, and language/literacy education.

Section I
Unpacking Academic Writing

1
What Is Academic Writing?

Importance of Academic Writing

Academic writing is ubiquitous in school and beyond. It is a means of producing, codifying, transmitting, evaluating, renovating, teaching, and learning knowledge and ideology in academic disciplines. Being able to write academically is widely recognized as essential to disciplinary learning and critical for academic success. Control over academic writing gives students and scholars capital, power, and agency in knowledge building, disciplinary practices, identity formation, social positioning, and career advancement.

Given the high stakes nature of academic writing, it is no wonder that students and aspiring scholars like you may have misconceptions about it. In fact, many inexperienced writers think that academic writing involves saying smart things in a convoluted, rigid way. They believe that academic writing presents an unnecessary barrier to academic learning and disciplinary socialization. They resign themselves to the notion that academic writing can only be done by people with sharp intelligence. They both revere and fear academic writing. Their veneration likely stems from the observation that academic writing is usually done by disciplinary experts and often required in the process of school learning and disciplinary practices. Their trepidation probably comes from the challenges they experience in striving to write in a style that is consistent with academic expectations but often sounds unfamiliar and feels alienating.

Defining Academic Writing

What is academic writing then? Simply put, academic writing is the writing done for academic purposes. It is entering into a conversation with others (Graff & Birkenstein, 2018). However, the way this conversation is constructed is different from how conversation in your everyday life is constructed. In other words, writing for academic purposes is different from writing for the purpose of everyday social interactions with friends and family members. Yes, academic writing involves expressing your ideas, but those ideas need to be presented as a response to some other person or group, and they also need to be carefully elaborated, well supported, logically sequenced, rigorously reasoned, and tightly woven together.

Moreover, academic writing is not monolithic, meaning that there is more than one kind, or genre, of academic writing. In academic settings, we write for many different purposes. We write letters, memorandums, reading responses, argumentative essays, technical reports, research articles, literature reviews, lab reports, grant proposals, conference abstracts, policy briefs, PowerPoint presentations, commentaries, book reviews, editorials, blogs, emails, and many other text types. Each of these kinds of academic writing has its own purpose, organizational structure, and linguistic features. Consider, for example, the following seven samples of academic writing from various sources (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Academic Writing Samples

Text 1-1: Abstract of an Article in an Engineering Research Journal	Rebuilding and maintaining the nation’s highway infrastructure will require very large capital outlays for many years to come. While the expenditures involved in the maintenance and construction of highway facilities are large, current methods of pavement design used in common engineering practice do not routinely take advantage of design optimization methodologies. This paper presents an optimization formulation for mechanistic-empirical pavement design that minimizes life-cycle costs associated with the construction and maintenance of flexible pavements. Sensitivity analysis is performed on the model to understand how the optimal design changes with respect to variations in the critical design inputs. Using typical values for the costs associated with the construction of each pavement layer and the reconstruction of failed pavement sections, it is determined that extended-life flexible pavements may provide significant life-cycle cost savings despite their higher initial construction cost. However, perpetual pavements that control critical strains to levels near the fatigue and endurance limits for the hot mix asphalt (HMA) and subgrade soil should be designed only when traffic levels are sufficiently high to warrant them or when sufficient uncertainty exists in the mean values of design input probability distributions. Optimization studies performed under uncertainty have showed that designs for extended-life pavements are robust with respect to physical variability in material properties, but are significantly impacted by a lack of knowledge of probability distributions. (McDonald & Madanat, 2012, p. 706)
Text 1-2: Excerpt from a College Finance Textbook	Total interest expense is the sum of cash and non-cash interest expense, most notably the amortization of deferred financing fees, which is linked from an assumptions page (see Exhibit 5.54). The amortization of deferred financing fees, while technically not interest expense, is included in total interest expense as it is a financial charge. In a capital structure with a PIK instrument, the non-cash interest portion would also be included in total interest expense and added back to cash flow from operating activities on the cash flow statement. As shown in Exhibit 5.30, ValueCo has non-cash deferred financing fees of $12 million in 2013E. These fees are added to the 2013E cash interest expense of $246.6 million to sum to $258.6 million of total interest expense. (Rosenbaum & Pearl, 2013, pp. 265–266)
Text 1-3: Excerpt from a Legal Contract in a Call for Grant Proposals	Dispute Resolution. 12.1 At the option of the parties, they shall attempt in good faith to resolve any dispute arising out of or relating to this Agreement by negotiation between executives who have authority to settle the controversy and who are at a higher level of management than the persons with direct responsibility for administration of this Agreement. All offers, promises, conduct and statements, whether oral or written, made in the course of the negotiation by any of the parties, their agents, employees, experts and attorneys are confidential, privileged and inadmissible for any purpose, including impeachment, in arbitration or other proceeding involving the parties, provided evidence that is otherwise admissible or discoverable shall not be rendered inadmissible. (Delaware Department of Education, 2020, p. 48)
Text 1-4: Excerpt from an Edited Scholarly Yearbook	My empirical work around this topic has emerged from the designed experiments of which I have been a part. These designed spaces, what I term social design experiments (Gutierrez, 2005; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010), are distinguished by sociocultural and proleptic views of learning in which learning is understood as the “organization for possible futures” (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 154). In these spaces, we design worlds that engage youth in expansive forms of learning that connect learning across relevant ecologies, principally peer and youth cultures, and academic and home communities “in ways that enable student to become designers of their own social futures” (Gutierrez, 2008, p. 156). A central component of this design has been the development of syncretic forms of expansive learning that leverage both everyday knowledge and school-based practices, including academic text structures, conventions, dispositions, and engagement with a range of texts fundamental to college-going, community-based and work-related literacies. (Gutierrez, 2014, p. 48)
Text 1-5: Excerpt from an Academic Journal in Music	As we can see it in Example 1, the first two notes in the right hand are Db and Bb, whereas those in the left hand are E and G, together forming the diminished seventh chord of E-G-Bb-Db. Similarly, if we combine the following two notes in the right hand (F#-Eb) with those in the left hand (A-C), we get another diminished seventh chord (A-C-Eb-F#). The combination of the two chords results in the octatonic collection of A-Bb-C-Db-Eb-E-F#-G. The rest of the descending passage is just a repetition of this same collection. At the same time, the lines unfold the minor seventh tetrachords (right hand: Db-Bb-F#-Eb and G-E-C-A; left hand: E-G-A-C and Bb-Db-Eb-F#) in each hand. (Tooth, 2016, p. 155)
Text 1-6: A Campus Email Memo to Undergraduate Students	March 19, 2019 Dear Emory Students, In light of the challenges and uncertainties posed by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Emory University has reached the difficult decision to indefinitely suspend all university-sponsored international travel including Summer 2020 study abroad programs. I know that you must be very disappointed and frustrated. As so many aspects of our lives chan...