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under the auspices of ... - pod auspicjami ...
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Structures
29-10-2010 23:55
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?
---
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,
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понравилось!
вверх^
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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?
---
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,
Thought and written, purposes of writing
17-10-2010 15:10
Journal entry Week 1.
The notion of “culture of the word” suggests that the process of writing is in no way a natural one, not a free flow of thoughts or a textual reflection of an objective fact, but rather an artificially organized process. As a student of literature, I have encountered this idea many times, so it became something self-evident, but mostly as applied to the belles letters as opposite to academic writing. In the tradition of academic writing in literary studies, we, perhaps are still quite ‘poisoned’ by a remembrance of positivist understanding of writing about literature, which stood on the point of possibility to create an objective piece of writing discussing the literary issues if we eliminate the subjectivity of our personal impressions about the given literary phenomenon, and thus we can let the reality itself express through our writing.
This is what comes to my mind when I try to recall how I encountered the requirements for pieces of writing during my secondary school and university years. Among my literature teachers at school, the one that comes to my mind now never fall for those formal requirements and encouraged a creative approach to writing compositions with reflections on the literary texts we read rather than keeping to a strict form of school composition. That an essay can both be creative and keep to the formal requirements never came to me during that period. Moreover, I was encouraged to consider my lack of ability to fit into the required number of pages an advantage, not a skill yet-to-gain (I had to bring my papers ready to the class where everybody was supposed to write there compositions). All in all, I left school with an understanding that the purpose of formal writing about literature is to write the more the better, because in this way you are able to show more of your knowledge.
During the university years, I experienced what can be called a switch from ‘telling a lot’ to ‘telling something interesting’, the idea about which I have already written in one of my entries for this course. This is what I encountered during creation of my term paper on my junior year, which is so far the longest text in comparative literature I’ve written. While describing all the details about the books I was studying, I have found out that they are hardly interesting to anyone (anyone reading for the sake of the text and new ideas, not for the sake of evaluating my ability to type a lot of letters). Moreover, the pieces written the earliest need the most revision in the end (because they were the furthest from the final concept). This means something much more than just the need to revise, actually; this was the discovery that overthrew the above-described positivist paradigm in my personal world. As soon as there arises the need to revise (I am talking matter, not grammar, at this moment), subsequently, speculations on the literary text can be further or closer not only to perfection, but also to a certain chosen conception. Subsequently, there are chosen conception in how we talk (write) about literature (even given that we keep within the same methodology the whole way through), subsequently, there is no natural order of things we are revealing by writing about those things.
The argumentation I have just described seems quite evident to me now, so that it actually was an effort not to construct my current attitude to academic writing, but to reconstruct the switch. Perhaps, anyone who steps onto the academic career track has to go through this ‘linguistic turn’ which the Western philosophy experienced in the first half of the 20th century: language is opaque. So, any piece of writing, formal or not, is not a statement of an independent fact, but a careful choice of words, which are the fact themselves. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that the masterpiece is created not by the hand which writes down but by the hand which stops. Again, this is the idea that has become an evident one for me and my fellow literary studies students when it comes to creative writing. However, the statement is quite applicable to academic writing as well: out of the diversity of the ways you can think about something you have to choose the most appropriate way to write about it.
In this way, I come the final point of my entry that needs to be covered, which is the correlation of ‘culture of the word’ and ‘culture of the thought’. To my mind, there’re several quite different ways in which they are bound. First, we can say that the thinkable ideas constitute an unlimited diversity, out of which we chose some limited consequence to write down (even when the written texts are understood as the modernist flow of thoughts or postmodernist unending variety of combinations, the diversity of what is thinkable is always wider than anything written down). In this way, the process of writing is something like ‘cultivating’ the wild diversity of thoughts. Second, which supposes an opposite connection, arisesЧитать далее...
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вверх^
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Journal entry Week 1.
The notion of “culture of the word” suggests that the process of writing is in no way a natural one, not a free flow of thoughts or a textual reflection of an objective fact, but rather an artificially organized process. As a student of literature, I have encountered this idea many times, so it became something self-evident, but mostly as applied to the belles letters as opposite to academic writing. In the tradition of academic writing in literary studies, we, perhaps are still quite ‘poisoned’ by a remembrance of positivist understanding of writing about literature, which stood on the point of possibility to create an objective piece of writing discussing the literary issues if we eliminate the subjectivity of our personal impressions about the given literary phenomenon, and thus we can let the reality itself express through our writing.
This is what comes to my mind when I try to recall how I encountered the requirements for pieces of writing during my secondary school and university years. Among my literature teachers at school, the one that comes to my mind now never fall for those formal requirements and encouraged a creative approach to writing compositions with reflections on the literary texts we read rather than keeping to a strict form of school composition. That an essay can both be creative and keep to the formal requirements never came to me during that period. Moreover, I was encouraged to consider my lack of ability to fit into the required number of pages an advantage, not a skill yet-to-gain (I had to bring my papers ready to the class where everybody was supposed to write there compositions). All in all, I left school with an understanding that the purpose of formal writing about literature is to write the more the better, because in this way you are able to show more of your knowledge.
During the university years, I experienced what can be called a switch from ‘telling a lot’ to ‘telling something interesting’, the idea about which I have already written in one of my entries for this course. This is what I encountered during creation of my term paper on my junior year, which is so far the longest text in comparative literature I’ve written. While describing all the details about the books I was studying, I have found out that they are hardly interesting to anyone (anyone reading for the sake of the text and new ideas, not for the sake of evaluating my ability to type a lot of letters). Moreover, the pieces written the earliest need the most revision in the end (because they were the furthest from the final concept). This means something much more than just the need to revise, actually; this was the discovery that overthrew the above-described positivist paradigm in my personal world. As soon as there arises the need to revise (I am talking matter, not grammar, at this moment), subsequently, speculations on the literary text can be further or closer not only to perfection, but also to a certain chosen conception. Subsequently, there are chosen conception in how we talk (write) about literature (even given that we keep within the same methodology the whole way through), subsequently, there is no natural order of things we are revealing by writing about those things.
The argumentation I have just described seems quite evident to me now, so that it actually was an effort not to construct my current attitude to academic writing, but to reconstruct the switch. Perhaps, anyone who steps onto the academic career track has to go through this ‘linguistic turn’ which the Western philosophy experienced in the first half of the 20th century: language is opaque. So, any piece of writing, formal or not, is not a statement of an independent fact, but a careful choice of words, which are the fact themselves. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that the masterpiece is created not by the hand which writes down but by the hand which stops. Again, this is the idea that has become an evident one for me and my fellow literary studies students when it comes to creative writing. However, the statement is quite applicable to academic writing as well: out of the diversity of the ways you can think about something you have to choose the most appropriate way to write about it.
In this way, I come the final point of my entry that needs to be covered, which is the correlation of ‘culture of the word’ and ‘culture of the thought’. To my mind, there’re several quite different ways in which they are bound. First, we can say that the thinkable ideas constitute an unlimited diversity, out of which we chose some limited consequence to write down (even when the written texts are understood as the modernist flow of thoughts or postmodernist unending variety of combinations, the diversity of what is thinkable is always wider than anything written down). In this way, the process of writing is something like ‘cultivating’ the wild diversity of thoughts. Second, which supposes an opposite connection, arises
Без заголовка
17-10-2010 15:05
А еще заведенный блог можно использовать для всяких все равно написанных штук, из разряда "чтобы добро не пропадало". Поэтому сейчас и, думаю, в ближайшие недели последуют "записи в дневник", заданные на курсе английского языка. Все равно стилистически я вдохновлялась иллюзией, будто я пишу запись в какой-то блог.
Отдельной записью, поскольку среди перемешанных у меня в голове языков я безнадежно гоняюсь за какой-то иллюзией языковой однородности хотя бы в рамках одного высказывания.
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вверх^
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А еще заведенный блог можно использовать для всяких все равно написанных штук, из разряда "чтобы добро не пропадало". Поэтому сейчас и, думаю, в ближайшие недели последуют "записи в дневник", заданные на курсе английского языка. Все равно стилистически я вдохновлялась иллюзией, будто я пишу запись в какой-то блог.
Отдельной записью, поскольку среди перемешанных у меня в голове языков я безнадежно гоняюсь за какой-то иллюзией языковой однородности хотя бы в рамках одного высказывания.
Без заголовка
17-10-2010 15:00
Всегда очень интересно начинать какой-то новый онлайн-блог, поскольку сумма символов, которые мы пишем о себе в дневнике, или в профиле какой-то социальной сети со всеми присоединенными фотографиями, - это всегда какая-то новая идентичность. Не то чтобы мне хватало энергии вести много блогов. Видимо, во мне не столько множественных личностей :) Единственное, с чем удавалось, - это разделять разные блоги по языкам, да и тогда не получалось вести их с одинаковым энтузиазмом. Есть какое-то стремление стянуть все в одно место, чтобы все эти разнообразные вещи, которые характеризуют с разных сторон, были рядом.
Поэтому не думаю, что я буду активно вести этот блог. Но когда стягиваешь все в одно место, в том числе и многочисленных реальских знакомых, иногда слишком долго приходится размышлять, а как констатация какого-нибудь простого факта будет воспринята теми и теми людьми, как они могут превратно или, наоборот, слишком точно прочитать простые слова из-за того, что знают меня с определенной стороны. И поскольку иметь заведенный блог все-таки в тысячу раз удобнее в смысле комментирования, может быть, буду его еще заодно использовать и для этого.
комментарии: 0
понравилось!
вверх^
к полной версии
Всегда очень интересно начинать какой-то новый онлайн-блог, поскольку сумма символов, которые мы пишем о себе в дневнике, или в профиле какой-то социальной сети со всеми присоединенными фотографиями, - это всегда какая-то новая идентичность. Не то чтобы мне хватало энергии вести много блогов. Видимо, во мне не столько множественных личностей :) Единственное, с чем удавалось, - это разделять разные блоги по языкам, да и тогда не получалось вести их с одинаковым энтузиазмом. Есть какое-то стремление стянуть все в одно место, чтобы все эти разнообразные вещи, которые характеризуют с разных сторон, были рядом.
Поэтому не думаю, что я буду активно вести этот блог. Но когда стягиваешь все в одно место, в том числе и многочисленных реальских знакомых, иногда слишком долго приходится размышлять, а как констатация какого-нибудь простого факта будет воспринята теми и теми людьми, как они могут превратно или, наоборот, слишком точно прочитать простые слова из-за того, что знают меня с определенной стороны. И поскольку иметь заведенный блог все-таки в тысячу раз удобнее в смысле комментирования, может быть, буду его еще заодно использовать и для этого.