com UTB 3124 Eine Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verlage Böhlau Verlag · Köln · Weimar · Wien Verlag Barbara Budrich · Opladen · Farmington Hills facultas.wuv · Wien Wilhelm Fink · München A. Francke Verlag · Tübingen und Basel Haupt Verlag · Bern · Stuttgart · Wien Julius Klinkhardt Verlagsbuchhandlung · Bad Heilbrunn Lucius & Lucius Verlagsgesellschaft · Stuttgart Mohr Siebeck · Tübingen C. Müller Verlag · Heidelberg Orell Füssli Verlag · Zürich Verlag Recht und Wirtschaft · Frankfurt am Main Ernst Reinhardt Verlag · München · Basel Ferdinand Schöningh · Paderborn · München · Wien · Zürich Eugen Ulmer Verlag · Stuttgart UVK Verlagsgesellschaft · Konstanz Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht · Göttingen vdf Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zürich www.com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:52 Uhr Dirk Siepmann/John D. Gallagher/ Mike Hannay/J.
Lachlan Mackenzie Writing in English: A Guide for Advanced Learners A. Francke Verlag Tübingen und Basel www.com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3. Dirk Siepmann is Professor of English Language Teaching at Osnabrück University. is Lecturer in Business English and Business French at Münster University.
Mike Hannay is Professor of English Language at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Lachlan Mackenzie is Honorary Professor of Functional Linguistics at the Vrije Uni- versiteit Amsterdam. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen National- bibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb. © 2008 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.
KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen ISBN 978-3-7720-8231-3 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Ver- lages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf chlorfrei gebleichtem und säurefreiem Werkdruckpapier.
Internet: http://www.de E-Mail: info@francke.de Einbandgestaltung: Atelier Reichert, Stuttgart Satz: Informationsdesign D. Fratzke, Kirchentellinsfurt Druck und Bindung: CPI – Ebner & Spiegel, Ulm Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8252-3124-8 (UTB-Bestellnummer) www.com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr Contents Preface. 9 MODULE I: Organizing ideas into text. 17 Chapter 1: The term paper: gearing up to start writing .1 The term paper as an argued text .2 The three processes of planning, writing proper and editing.3 Making the plan.
33 Chapter 2: Different types of term paper: Two models .1 Term paper as essay or as mini-article .2 Quotation and paraphrase .3 The literary essay .4 The linguistic mini-article. 47 Chapter 3: Title, Introduction, Body and Conclusion.3 The Body sections.4 Paragraphs within the Body sections. 71 Chapter 4: Getting the paper ready for submission: Editing and formatting.com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr VI Contents MODULE II: Building effective sentences. 83 Chapter 1: Basic issues in sentence construction.
96 Chapter 2: Information packaging .1 Basic grammatical moulds .2 The order of information in the clause .1 The front of the clause .2 The end of the clause .3 Fitting the sentence into the running text .3 Organizing the starting point .1 Clauses with passive verb forms .5 The th-wh construction .6 Non-agent subjects .4 Establishing a special kind of starting point: framing.5 Organizing the end point .6 What goes wrong in clause construction .2 Bad textual fit .3 Unclear focus signalling .com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr Contents VII Chapter 3: Complex sentences .1 Different kinds of sentence .2 Clause combining: the basic forms.2 Non-restrictive relative clauses .3 Non-finite clauses .3 Foregrounding and backgrounding .1 The basic patterns .1 Aspects of interruption .7 Problems with sentence length .1 Commas 1: the principle of semantic unity .2 Commas 2: optional use.1 Separating members of a sequence.2 Separating adverbial clauses .3 Separating coordinated clauses .4 Separating initial constituents.1 The basic functions .1 The basic uses .com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr VIII Contents 4.2 The difference between colon and semicolon as combining devices.5 Dashes and brackets .6 Commas revisited: dealing with comma splices. 214 Bibliography a) Sources of examples. 217 MODULE III: Lexis and Grammar. 219 Chapter 1: A constructional view of language.
220 Chapter 2: Academic lexis and patterning .1 Nouns and noun patterns .1 Complex noun phrases in English and German .2 Productive nominal patterns .3 Position and length of complex noun phrases .4 General strategies for noun phrase building .1 Major groups of adjectives .2 Participial and compound adjectives.3 General strategies for building adjective phrases .3 Prepositions and prepositional phrases .4 Verbs and verb patterns .1 Common academic verbs .5 The interface between verb patterning and sentence-building. 259 Chapter 3: From word to collocation.1 Words, words, words .2 How words go together .3 Collocation of semantic-pragmatic features .4 Collocational gaps and incompatibilities .com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr Contents IX 3.5 Making creative use of collocation.6 The interplay of collocation and patterning .2 Exemplificatory infinitive clauses .3 Summary: Strategies for forming word groups. 286 Chapter 4: Rhetorical moves and their lexical realizations .1 Stating your topics and objectives .2 Excluding a topic from consideration .2 Reporting, summarizing and paraphrasing .1 Summaries and abstracts.2 Strategies for paraphrasing .3 Expressing opinions and criticizing .4 Enumerating ideas and changing the topic .5 Topicalizing specific items.7 Comparison and contrast .9 Cause, reason and explanation .10 Consequences and result. 386 MODULE IV: Style.
389 Chapter 1: Style and stylistic competence .1 What is style? .2 How to achieve stylistic competence .4 From non-specialist to specialist text .com Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:53 Uhr X Contents Chapter 2: The principles of style .2008 18:00:54 Uhr 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 pro- fessions. Furthermore, as the internationalization of our world continues, so we all are increasingly being faced with the tasks of reading and produc- ing 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 de- mand 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 Gym- nasium (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 Eng- lish.
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 objec- tive insights into those features of English academic text that may pose prob- lems 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 Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:54 Uhr 2 Preface nominalization, claiming that texts will be easier to understand if the writ- er 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 construc- tion 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. advocate that + subjunctive, expect that + will-future): Most of those who advocate or expect the supersession of capitalism by social- ism 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 Eng- lish 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 con- fident 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 na- tive 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 Siepmann_s00I_460AK3.2008 18:00:54 Uhr Preface 3 literacy’ approaches. According to Lea and Street, the study skills methodol- ogy 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”.1 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 crafts- man. Part of any induction into a community (in our case, the community of ac- ademic writers in English) involves learning the ropes and discovering what is allowed and what is disallowed.