Skip to main content
Welcome to ‘Seeds of Academic Writing¨, my blog. As a blogger, I am a complete novice but I hope to use this corner of cyberspace to share my reflections upon education in general and ELT in particular.
 I sincerely believe in the importance and benefits of a strong, sustained critiquing process in order to produce better academic papers which do state my views on educational issues. Therefore, I embrace this blog as an opportunity to grow, learn and refine both as a scholarly writer and as educator under the critical eye and nurturing hand of other professionals who also feel the need to take this journey into academic writing. 
Anchors aweigh!

Popular posts from this blog

Contrastive Analysis of Introduction and Methods Sections

By Paula Gabriela Ferrari Over the past decade, the world of academic publishing has rapidly modernized and the intersection of research and publishing has become ever more complex (Swales and Feak, 2004). In order to participate in a given discourse community, potential researchers need to be acquainted with the different rhetorical features each section of the research paper has.   According to Bruce (1983, as cited by Swales, 1990, p. 133), m ost RAs are prepared according to the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) standard format because they follow the cycle of inductive scientific inquiry.   Even though many relevant aspects of   the RA sections in different fields have been pointed out by scholars in an attempt to reflect the characteristics of the genre itself (Swales, 1990; Swales & Feak, 2004; Hyland, 2004), more contrastive studies are needed to identify the specificities of each discipline.   The aim of this paper is to analyse an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Contrastive Analysis of Abstracts in Medicine and Education Research Articles

By Paula Gabriela Ferrari Even though there are no figures available as to the amount of scientific literature that is annually published in all languages, it is undeniable that the world output of Research Articles (RAs) has  drastically increased to several millions in the last two decades.  Owing to the ¨North-South imbalance in the world¨ (Swales, 1987, p. 43), English has become the ¨ de facto language¨ of RAs (Simionescu & Simion, 2004, p . 129).  Two natural consequences may be derived from this: First, the   scientific style of English has become more sophisticated as it has ¨evolved to meet the needs of scientific method and of scientific argument and theory¨ (Halliday & Martin, 1993, p . 84).  Second, publications in national languages do not have the same status as English-refereed ones (Swales, 1987). Although the quality of the abstracts does not necessarily affect the journal editors’ decisions to accept or reject RAs (Swales ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discourse Communities

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...
Post a Comment
Read more