Writing Scientific English: A Workbook
Abstract
Success in science depends nowadays on effective communication in English. This workbook is specifically designed to give under- and post-graduates confidence in writing scientific English. Examples and exercises show how to avoid common errors and how to rephrase and improve scientific texts. The generation of a model manuscript enables the reader to recognise how scientific English is constructed and how to follow the conventions of scientific writing. Guidelines for structuring written work and vocabulary lists will encourage young scientists to develop a concise and mature style. The workbook is accessible to students of many fields, including those of the natural and technical sciences, medicine, psychology and economics.
... Apesar de não existirem regras estanques para a escrita científica (Guilford, 2001), trata-se de um tipo de escrita que privilegia frases simples e claras, ainda que exigente, obedecendo a uma estrutura específica (Ädel & Erman, 2011;Skern, 2009). No caso da psicologia e da educação, são seguidas, habitualmente, as normas da American Psychological Association -APA (2020). ...
... O inglês constitui a língua oficial da ciência (Rezaeian, 2015). Segundo Skern (2009), isso deve-se a razões históricas (Tardy, 2004). Nesta secção irá focar-se as principais razões que deverão levar o investigador a publicar os seus trabalhos em língua inglesa. ...
... No entanto, como mais adiante iremos explicar, não é necessário ser nativo para escrever bem e de forma compreensível em inglês (Clemens, 2021). De acordo com Lindsay (2011), a linguagem científica caracteriza-se por ser objetiva e sucinta, construída recorrendo a frases simples (Skern, 2009). Nesse sentido, o nível de inglês que é exigido a um investigador em ciência não poderá ser o nível exigido a um autor que escreva um texto literário em língua inglesa, por exemplo. ...
A publicação de artigos científicos em revistas especializadas é, atualmente, o veículo privilegiado para a disseminação da investigação científica. Ainda assim, muitos investigadores sentem receio e insegurança quando são solicitados a redigir artigos em inglês, principalmente os mais inexperientes no uso desta língua na escrita. Este artigo destina-se a investigadores, sobretudo das áreas da psicologia e da educação, que pretendam iniciar ou consolidar a sua escrita científica em inglês, e tem como objetivos centrais, por um lado, sensibilizá-los para a pertinência e a importância de publicarem os seus trabalhos em língua inglesa e, por outro, fornecer-lhes algumas orientações práticas e dicas úteis para serem bem-sucedidos nessa demanda. Para tal, iremos procurar desconstruir alguns mitos relacionados com a escrita científica em inglês e, posteriormente, iremos apresentar alguns exemplos de expressões frequentemente utilizadas em textos científicos naquelas áreas.
... Abstracts have turned into one of the most prominent scientific genres used in academia (Busch-Lauer 2012;Skern 2011;Swales/Feak 2009). They are written to accompany a scientific research article or paper proposal for an upcoming conference. ...
... Major results are included in: Baßler (2003); Busch-Lauer (2001; Dahl (2009); Dayrell (2009) ;Fluck (1988Fluck ( , 1989; Gläser (1991); Gnutzmann (1991); Golebiowski (2009) ;Hyland/Tse (2005); Lorés (2004); Lorés-Sanz (2008); Martín-Martín (2005); Melander et al. (1994); Müller (2008); Salager-Meyer (1990b); Skern (2011); Swales/Feak (1994); Tsai (2010); Van Bonn/ Swales (2007). Results of previous work is cited and discussed in Busch-Lauer (2012). ...
... Moreover, a number of homepages of universities and colleges address this topic. Skern (2011) also included the genre abstract in his textbook on L2E academic writing specifically targeting the Germanspeaking audience. ...
Abstracts have turned into one of the most prominent scientific genres used in academia. They are written to accompany a scientific research article or paper proposal for an upcoming conference. Moreover, abstracts are required for graduation works such as B.A., M.A. and PhD theses, grant proposals, short communications and for specific disciplinary purposes (e.g. executive summary). Their main function is to give the reader orientation on whether to read the complete text or to evaluate whether a piece of research is worth presenting or publishing. Moreover, abstracts are used to easily store and retrieve information in online library catalogues and abstracting journals.
It is the purpose of this chapter to describe the communicative and rhetorical characteristics of the abstract as a genre of particular relevance in the academic field.5 First the various categories of abstracts will be described. Then I will focus on disciplinary, crosslinguistic and intercultural aspects. Text composition (length and structure) and language features will be illustrated by examples.
... Abstracts have turned into one of the most prominent scientific genres used in academia (Busch-Lauer 2012;Skern 2011;Swales/Feak 2009). They are written to accompany a scientific research article or paper proposal for an upcoming conference. ...
... Moreover, a number of homepages of universities and colleges address this topic. Skern (2011) also included the genre abstract in his textbook on L2E academic writing specifically targeting the Germanspeaking audience. ...
The book brings together a rich variety of perspectives on abstracts as an academic genre. Drawing on genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the studies collected here combine attention to generic structure with emphasis on language variation and change, thus offering a multi-perspective view on a genre that is becoming one of the most important in present-day research communication. The chapters are organized into three sections, each one offering distinct but sometimes combined perspectives on the exploration of this academic genre. The first section looks at variation across cultures through studies comparing English with Spanish, Italian and German, while also including considerations on variation across genders or the native/non-native divide. The second section centres on variation across disciplines and includes a wide range of studies exploring disciplinary identities and communities, as well as different degrees of centrality in the disciplinary community. The third and final section explores language and genre change by looking at how authorial voice and metadiscourse have changed over the past few decades under the influence of different media and different stakeholders.
Der Beitrag beschreibt die Relevanz der informationsverdichtenden Textsorte Abstract in der Wissenschaftskommunikation. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Definition, die Klassifikation und die Struktur sowie ausgewählte Merkmale dieser Textsorte.
Im ersten Teil des Beitrags werden die unterschiedlichen Arten von Abstracts anhand von Textbeispielen aus der Linguistik, der Medizin und den Technikwissenschaften expliziert. Im zweiten Teil untersucht der Beitrag anhand von Abstracts, die von deutschen Studierenden der Technik- und Ingenieurwissenschaften im Rahmen ihrer fachbezogenen Englischausbildung verfasst wurden, inwieweit die textsortenimmanenten Merkmale auch von Lernenden in der Textproduktion in der Fremdsprache umgesetzt wurden. Mit dieser qualitativ beschreibenden Untersuchung trägt die Studie zur kontrastiven Fachtextsortenbeschreibung und andererseits als Praxisbericht zur Vermittlung von Textsorten im fachbezogenen Fremdsprachenunterricht an Hochschulen bei.
Abstracts have attracted the attention of researchers in EAP mainly due to their “gatekeeping” role in the academic research field. Far from being the mere summary of a research, they offer the opportunity for the writer to get his/her voice heard. More specifically, PhD abstracts provide invaluable insight into newcomers’ vision of the targeted community’s discursive expectations. In this paper, the focus is set on linguistic devices used to build efficient “ambassadors” of a new academic voice. My hypothesis is that one particularly effective device is the use of “collocational chains”, based on reiteration and collocational variations across the text. These chains focus the reader’s attention on the key concepts and guide it through the text and across the moves. A combined corpus and text approach was applied to a corpus comprised of 60 PhD abstracts, written in English for Didactics of mathematics and Materials Science, by English native and non-native (French) writers. Texts were marked for moves and collocational chains. Chains’ pivotal terms were studied at corpus level, while the structuring role of the collocational chains was examined at text level. Collected data were contrasted, so as to better understand characteristic discursive strategies for each discipline, as well as the influence of linguistic origin.
The creation of a persuasive scientific text involves a combination of innovation and conformity, meeting the requirements of the genre and the expectations of the discourse community. This is based on an array of rhetorical choices and linguistic features, one of which has been particularly well researched in recent years: recurrent co-occurrences or ‘collocations’. The author’s study aims at determining to what extent these patterns and their variations contribute to the creation of a persuasive scientific discourse. The types of combinations between general scientific and specialised terms are studied so as to understand their role in the rhetorical progression of the text. The corpus includes PhD abstracts from two fields that were written in English by native and non-native speakers. The analysis provides evidence that each corpus highlights specific disciplinary strategies based on the use of textual collocational variations, or ‘collocational chains’. While building textual cohesion, these chains contribute to the perception of the text as both coherent and persuasive. However, they do not appear to be mastered equally by native and non-native speakers.
This paper presents an approach which performs a Style Analysis of Academic Writing in terms of formal voice, readability
and scientific language. Our intention is an analysis of academic writing style as a feedback for the authors and editors.
The extracted features of a document collection are used to create Self-Organizing Maps which are the interim results to generate
reports in our Full Automatic Paper Analysis System (Fapas). To evaluate this method, the system has to solve different tasks
to verify the informative value of the generated maps and reports.
Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s everyday life. In this paper we investigate the particularities of scientific writing and explore the features and limitations of existing tools for scientific writing. Deriving from this analysis and an online survey of the scientific writing processes of students and researchers at the University of Paderborn, we identify key principles to simplify scientific writing and reviewing. Finally, we introduce a novel approach to support scientific writing with a tool called SciFlow that builds on these principles and state of the art technologies like cloud computing.
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