Strategies for acknowledging sources in academic contexts
Participating in an academic discourse community of teachers and researchers implies “constructing
knowledge through building texts and stimulating discussion” (Pintos & Crimi, 2010, p.6).To this respect, not only content is important but also how to communicate it. As Grabe and Kaplan (1996, cited in Pintos & Crimi, 2010) have stated, academic writing involves composing for knowledge transforming.
In the present paper, an article about the characteristics of academic writing will be analyzed (Myles, 2002). The purpose of this work is to exemplify and analyze how knowledge may be generated to share it with others. Thus, academic writing skills such as different strategies for acknowledging sources, use of reporting verbs and introductory phrases that make the writing flow smoothly will be considered.
Myles (2002) seems to have loaded her article with a wide variety of in-text citations, which may be mainly due to its length. The author uses a range of techniques to quote and acknowledge the sources she has consulted. For instance, she quotes Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1987) exact words when they point out that when writing “there is a two way interaction between developing knowledge and developing text” (Bereiter &Scardamalia, 1987, as cited in Myles, 2002, para.2). She “borrows” these researchers’ exact words because they seem to support clearly her idea about the definition of academic writing.
Another instance of a direct quotation might be Swales ’s (1990) idea that “writing should not be viewed solely as an individual oriented inner directed process but as much as and acquired response to discourse convention…within particular communities”(Models of L1 and L2 Writing, 2002 para.3). It is worth to mention the use of omissions which may be taken as a device for avoiding quoting everything pointed out by another writer because of space reasons or because not all the words, sentences or parts of paragraph are necessary. In this case the omission appears not to alter the meaning of the concept expressed and be grammatically correct when integrated to the text (Purdue Owl, 2007).
In addition, when Myles (2002) mentions the cognitive factors that influence on academic writing, she cites
Mc Laughlin’s (1988) idea of error transfer, by means of a block quotation, which according to American
Psychology Association (APA) style manual, (cited in Purdue Owl, 2007) it consists of more than forty
words which outstand separated from the text. The whole paragraph has been considered useful to define
transfer of errors: “[l]earners lack the necessary information in the second language or the attention capacity
to activate the appropriate second language routine. But such an account says little about why certain
linguistic forms transfer and others do not” (1988, as cited in Myles, 2002, p.50).
In the quotation mentioned above, there is an example of insertion. The capital l between square brackets
appears to indicate that the sentence does not start in the same fashion as the original source. In the block
quotation of Yau’s words (1991 cited in Myles, 2002) when the influence of second language factors on
writing performance are pointed out, a capital letter is also inserted unlike the original to write a new
paragraph.
All in-text citations, regardless the technique used by the author, summary or paraphrase, seem to meet
academic style requirements. Sources are acknowledged through the authors’ surnames and year of
publication as well as the page number when a direct quotation is used (Purdue Owl, 2007).Being a member
of a discourse community implies avoiding plagiarism, which may be defined as the illegal use of copyright
material. Therefore, Myles (2002) acknowledges accurately every single idea or concept that has been
searched or created by other authors.
Furthermore, Myles (2002) also uses a variety of introductory phrases such as “According to the
researchers” (Models of L1 and L2 Writing, 2002, para.5) when she refers to Flower and Hayes’ (1980)
models of writing to characterize second language writing. Another example may be “the Flower and
Hayes’s (1980, 1981) model” where the finding appears as the focus which is emphasized. However, the
author has most of the time paraphrased or summarized other sources which support her own arguments,
followed by parenthetical citations. This may be due to giving more relevance in the text to the main idea
pointed out than to the source.
According to Pintos and Crimi (2010), it is also important to “replace common words for others, more
enhancing words…[Thus] effective writers search for interesting, precise words” (p. 17). In the context of
academic writing a wide variety of synonyms of reporting verbs should be used to make the reading more
appealing. That is the case of the Myles’s (2002) article where reporting verbs such as show, stress, point
out, suggests, mentions, conclude, observe, note, criticize, examine are used. All of them seem to indicate a
different action by the cited authors.
As Mac Donald (2004, cited in Pintos and Crimi, 2010) observes, the knowledge generation function that
academic writing performs may be regulated by an academic register, the proficiency in language use and the
ability to integrate information from different sources. The analysis presented in this paper attempts to show
that language tools such as reporting verbs, introductory phrases, insertions, omissions and different types of
citations may be considered as the main strategies for acknowledging sources in academic contexts.
References
Myles, J. (2002). Second language writing and research: The writing process and error
analysis in student texts. TESEL-EJ 6, (2) 2002 Queen’s University Retrieved October
Pintos, V. & Crimi, Y. (2010) Unit 2 Personal narratives in teaching Retrieved September
Pintos, V. & Crimi, Y. (20 10) Unit 3: Academic writing Retrieved October 2010, from
Purdue OWL. (2006).Quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing Retrieved August 2010 from
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/563/01
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