Seeds of Academic Writing

- An Analytical Essay -             There are several systems currently used in journal writing to document sources.  Within the social sciences, APA (American Psychological Association, 2010) style is frequently used by journal publishers.  The purpose of this paper is to analyze the techniques for crediting sources in the journal article Providing Increased Access to English L2 Students of Computer Science at a South African University (Dalvit, Murray, Terzoli, Zhao & Mini, 2005).   The specific mechanisms of in-text citations, signal phrases and referencing are subjected to examination in the light of the conventions of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2010) in its 6 th edition.              With regard to the use of in-text citations, APA (2010) style requires writers to include the author’s last name, the...

Swales’ (1990) Delineation of Discourse Communities in Practice For many years scholars have directed their efforts to identify the key features that define a discourse community as such.  It should come as no surprise that it was not until 1990 that those features became clearly delimited, thanks to Swales’ (1990) research in this field.  According to Swales (1990), there are six key characteristics that are necessary to identify a group of individuals as a discourse community.  The purpose of this paper is to examine four prescribed articles under the light of Swales’ theory as regards discourse community requirements. As a first requirement, Swales (1990) postulates that, whether tacitly or explicitly, a discourse community pursues a set of common goals which are public.  In accord with this concept, Kelly-Kleese (2004) contends that the community college should be considered a discourse community in its own right because ¨Its members have, over time, develop...