This week we are studying the structure of a classical English academic
essay, and the discussion questions are as follows:

1. English academic essays are characterized by high level of structuring.
What is the reason for this level of structuring in English academic texts?
Does the reader benefit from it?
2. Do you think the overall structure of an essay is appropriate only for
this genre of English academic writing or could the general principles be
used while you are writing a research paper or an abstract for a conference?
3. Do you consider Ukrainian academic writing as structured as English
writing?

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Dear all,

This week's topic for discussion is definitely an interesting, but also a complicated one.

First of all, I agree that the existance of a tradition to write well-structured academic papers in English helps the reader to comprehend the author's idea a lot. However, I am not sure if it was the cause for this tradition to arise. A good structure and a possibility to know what the piece of writing is about from the very first paragraph would help readers from other cultures as well, but we see that this is not enough to make a prevailing part of authors follow this tradition. Perhaps answer to this question need a good culture study of the roots of academic writing in English-speaking countries.

With regard to the appropriateness of the structure of an essay for other genres of academic writing, my experience suggests me answer positively. There's some general principle you can follow in any genre, which is (what seems the most important to me) the idea that you state your main idea after a short introduction, and in the same time announce the aspects in which the idea will be developed, and after all the body paragraphs of the essay you restate this idea with a conclusion of the most important 'findings'. We can say that a piece of writing has a good structure when this pattern can be seen on all its levels, as a drop of water can tell you about the whole ocean. On the level of a separate paragraph, you state your main topic in the first sentence, and it doesn't need restatement if this piece of argumentation is short enough for the reader to keep it in mind. If a piece of argumentation requires several paragraphs, it's a good idea to restate the conclusion of this short argumentation in the end. The same works for a chapter of a thesis (short introduction with a 'funnel' from the previously discussed aspects of the topic, announcement of the main questions to be solved in this chapter, and a conclusion after the whole chapter) and for the whole thesis.
I remember when I first encountered the notion of such a structure (of a paragraph, then) on the first year of my bachelor program. It seemed really unnatural for me then. Simply 'narrating' seemed a better way that was more correspondent with the natural flow of thought, in the same way as Dominika has just written. Since then, however, the idea of applying such a structure on my academic writings (I still distinguish among those and outside-of-academia writings ;) ) developed into the very my understanding of how an academic text should be done. Contrary to this 'natural flow of narration', putting the thesis statement in the beginning of the argumentation helps us look a bit further than the immediate arguments, as if to bear in mind the whole purpose of why some piece of writing is necessary. So, even if don't write such a 'thesis statement' before writing a chapter, a sub-chapter or a sub-sub-chapter, it is a good idea to add them when polishing the text, in order to answer why I need this piece of text here at all.

Answering to the third question, I will disagree with the idea that Ukrainian academic writing has no structure at all, as it was put above in this discussion. In my opinion, this is an exaggeration. There're certain traditions for structuring an academic paper that go back to the Soviet times. We write in the introduction of our Ukrainian-language papers that "this paper consists of an introduction, 5 chapter, a conclusion, and a list of citations that include 160 position". And it really does! Quite another thing is that this notion of structure doesn't reach the level of such specification as the English-language tradition does (the level of paragraphs), and it is not formally taught, so when somebody needs to create an appropriate introduction to his or her paper, they have to look up in an example how to name all those necessary aspects (subject, object, novelty, methodology, etc), and thus these requirements seem something external and unnecessary trouble (while keeping in mind what your methodology is or what basic issues you are going to solve in a particular chapter is a useful prerequisite to creating a paper that holds together).

I am sorry for being a little bit too wordy. Appetite come when you start to eat. (Ideas come when you start to write)

Wishing you a good Friday's night,