Reflection 12

Challenging stereotypes about academic writing:

Complexity, elaboration, explicitness

By Douglas Biber, Bethany Gray

I will start reflecting on this topic from the end of the study which claims that in academic writing researchers need to achieve two goals: ‘clarity’ and ‘economy’. These new goals were revealed and emphasized due to the investigation of a corpus of academic research articles which showed less elaborated and more implicitly stated meaning relations. Both of the goals are important for the reader to have no doubts about the intended meaning and to quickly scan through a research article and extract the essential information. However, these two constructs are in tension with each other. Achieving clarity is easier through elaborated sentences and explicit meaning relations; while ‘economy’ entails more compressed and implicit meaning relations. This creates a number of problems both for educators and novice researchers as how to teach and learn the skills of decoding academic writing and the skills of producing clear but compact academic articles.

To enable the novice researchers to become both successful readers and writers, I think, educators first should expose them to multiple research articles, raise their awareness about the style, structure, and discourse of academic writing, and help them decode the meaning behind the text, and improve their comprehension. Second, they can construct various activities where learners are to transform elaborated sentences into more compressed ones maintaining the meaning of the text, and the opposite. Or, they can do activities related to clausal and phrasal modifications. After they get practice, learners should be given opportunity to implement their skills and knowledge of academic writing in the production of their own articles.