Part of my PhD aims to help students/citizen scientists write like a scientist. I?m currently 5 months into my PhD and hopefully by 2.5 years time, in 2015, I?ll find the way to develop one?s academic writing abilities. All the people I met especially the ones who part of an academic environment, all get excited with the idea of ?writing like a scientist?. ?Oh wow, I?d love to be able to do that??. But what is the key thing in academic writing? Are there any rules? any conventions? any gold standards that needs to be followed? Who knows maybe I?ll be the one who find those standards. But will these standards be valid in any case, under any circumstances and will work for every discipline? Or do tutors miss something when evaluating bunch of student essays?
Just read a paper called ?Different values, different skills? A comparison of essay writing by students from arts and science backgrounds? written by Sarah North. Paper tells very interesting findings of author?s?3 year research project in which the effect of disciplinary variation into student writing discussed.?Aim of the study is figuring out how students? writing shaped by disciplinary background.
Study done with students from art and science backgrounds, who took the same undergraduate course called ?History of Science? which requires essay writing as an assignment.?According the results, average mark of essays written by art students was higher than the science students at a significant level which could be one proof for author?s hypothesis of variations in disciplines affect the writing styles. As tutors? feedback comment might explain the low grades, author examined those and found out that science students got significantly more negative comments overall. Reasons for that are: 1)keeping the word limit too much or too little, and 2)lack of balance due to overemphasis on fact description rather than evaluation of the sources (lack of critical evaluation of the source material).?Then author examined the linguistic differences within the essays. Results show that there is a significant difference between ?theme/rhyme? structure. This refers to, the first section of the sentence (theme) provides an interpretation for the rest clause (rhyme) so that reader can point out author?s following message, what s/he is going to say and his/her?critical stance. According to results,?art students use orienting themes, which comment on the epistemic status of the following proposition, more in their essays whereas science students do not. The reason, as author argues, is because people who writes in soft disciplines (humanities, art etc.) make interpretations of other?s arguments to construct their knowledge whereas people in hard disciplines (engineering, pure science etc.)?construct?knowledge based on the numbers; so facts speak themselves. In short, art-oriented knowledge is represented?with?more?rhetorical?performance rather than straightforward representation of reality.
Finally, author interviewed both student groups, which was the most interesting and enjoyable part of the paper. Interview was done to better understand views and expectations of both groups about how academic writing should be performed, how students tackle with it and what they think about the other group. Here are the overall results:
- All art students except one (the one who studied science before) described their essay writing process as rewriting over and over, possibly in four drafts whereas science students agreed on involving one revision cycle is enough. They said it usually takes a couple of hours to write and then just a morning to polish it up.
- In terms of word limit, art students complaint about cutting their material down whereas science students have the opposite problem as they can?t reach the required length because they only state facts, numbers and etc.
- Art students have concerns in terms of?constructing?an argument?although?they have greater familiarity with essay writing. As science students believe that knowledge is a matter of fact rather than interpretation, they are less likely to concern.
- Art students believe that science is a straightforward subject as it is either right or wrong and you?ll write it boom, boom, boom.?Science students believe that writing something technically is just giving proven pure research facts, it is straightforward and you don?t need to ?flowering it up with the words?.
Paper clearly shows how different both groups are, the way they write, and what they think about writing. I?m myself a cross-disciplinary person. I studied education and engineering. I can see how different was my own writing in two different communities. My writing was completely different and written based on the?requirements. As my essays for education required more than one submission (Draft1, Draft2 and Final Draft), they were written through a long period of time, which require literature review, critical evaluation of them and interpretation about the link of those with my study. Whereas engineering ones were called as ?technical reports? most of the time required to be written simple, to the point and short. They should not exceed 2 pages, should state mainly the results I?ve found and that?s it; no more ?flowering the facts up with words?. They were like my chemistry experiment?result?reports.
It is clear that expectations differ in disciplines. And this changes the way people write. So it changes possibly the gold standards of academic writing, doesn?t it? So how can we develop standards for?academic?writing and how can we help people to write like a scientist? If I?d have the standards, would they suit for everyone and make everyone scientist in their writing? Who are we talking about here? Pure scientist??Physics? Chemists? Or? As I explained in my previous blog post I?m getting benefit from Xerox?s XIP parser which identifies rhetorically significant sentences within scientific documents and classifies them as a novel idea, contrasting statement, background knowledge and so on. What would XIP find in arts and science in terms of rhetorically salient sentences? How novelty would change in two different group of students? essays on same topic? Interpretation of such results should be considered by taking disciplinary variations into account for sure.
This paper made me think about the group of people who I?m?targeting, their background, and expectations.?It says one?s sociocultural history?affects?the ability to use?particular?discourse; not the cognitive skills and if I aim to analyse the use of particular discourse in writing to improve one?s academic writing abilities, I should focus on the sociocultural history of the group?I?m working with.
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