Practical English Writing Skills for EFL Writers · PDF fileillness in the previous two years reported lower happiness ... Readers will judge your sentences to be ... the topic sentence,

COPYRIGHT © 2014 DUKE KUNSHAN UNIVERSITY.

Practical English Writing Skills for EFL WritersEdie Allen, Graduate Communications

CCUGH 2017


There is a shared responsibility among global health professionals to build a network around an issue, synthesize findings and translate them into practices that solve the problem.


How we can work together this week:Identify your individual error patterns

Improve in some areas of typical difficulty for EFL writers and try some new revision strategies

Learn about a few new language resources


5 Important Storytelling Reminders for EFL Writers

Meeting Reader Expectations

Creating Flow

Organizing Effectively

Choosing Words Well

Citing Appropriately


Meeting Reader Expectations (Gopen and Swan)

1. Place the person or thing whose "story" a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.

1. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.


Reader Expectations Continued…

3. Place appropriate "old information" (material already stated) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.

4. Place in the stress position (end of the sentence) the "new information" you want the reader to emphasize.


Reader Expectations Continued

5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.

6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.

PhD student Juan Pablo Ruiz... founded Labmosphere.com, a website with articles on mental-health struggles experienced by junior researchers. People who are happy and satisfied perform more creatively and productively at work, he notes — an idea that is well supported by research. A 2015 study by a team at the University of Warwick found that workers were 10% more productive after watching a comedy video than a control group that did not watch it. Conversely, people who had experienced a major life shock from a family death or illness in the previous two years reported lower happiness and were 10% less productive (A. J. Oswald et al. J. Labor Econ. 33, 789–822; 2015).

Adapted from - Work-Life Balance: Break or Burn Out, Nature 545, 375-377, May 17, 2017

http://labmosphere.com/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/681096


Examples of clear subject (-from The Craft of Research)

Too precise a specification of information-processing requirements incurs a risk of a decision-maker’s over-or underestimation, resulting in the inefficient use of costly resources.

vs. a clearer statement:

When a decision-maker specifies too precisely the resources he needs to process information, he may over- or underestimate them and thereby use costly resources inefficiently.

“Readers will judge your sentences to be clear and readable to the degree that you make their subjects name the main characters in your story. When you do this, your subjects will be short, specific, and concrete.” The Craft of Research, p. 253

If rain forests (subject) are stripped (verb) the earth’s biosphere (subject) may be damaged (verb).

If rain forests (subject) are stripped (verb), the earth’s biosphere (subject) may be damaged (verb).

The stripping of rain forests in the service of short-term economic interests (subject) could result (verb) in damage to the earth’s biosphere.

Compare:


• Avoid long noun phrases

The emergence of English as the international language of scientific communication has been widely documented.

VS.English has emerged as the international language of communication. This phenomenon has been widely documented.


Three Principles of Clear Style

Express crucial actions in verbs (not in nouns).

Make your central characters the subjects of those verbs; keep those subjects short, concrete, and specific.

Offer the reader old information before new.- The Craft of Research


Revision Suggestion: Try this testUnderline the first 6 or 7 words of every sentence.

1. Are the underlined subjects concrete characters, not abstractions?

2. Do the underlined verbs name specific actions, not general ones like have, make, do, be and so on?

3. Have you underlined words that your readers will find familiar and easy to understand (usually words used before)?


Diagnostic Test ContinuedUnderline the last four or five words in every sentence. You should have underlined:

• Technical-sounding words that you are using for the first time

• The newest, most complex information

• The information being emphasized

• Concepts that the next sentences will develop -The Craft of Research





Choosing Words and Word Forms

Citing appropriately


Creating Flow

Ordering information from old to new

Using linking words and phrases (however, therefore, etc.)

Unifying a text with key word repetition

Offering reader “This + summary word”


Linking words and phrases create flowWhich transition words are used in writing in your field? EFL writers sometimes use these incorrectly:

In contrast vs. on the contrary

Besides,...

On the one hand,..

And...

But...

Key word RepetitionHowever, disclosing HIV status does not always benefit the individuals since they might face the consequence of rejection and discrimination from the recipient, as well as privacy loss (Levy et al., 1999; Mansergh, Marks, & Simoni, 1995). The response of the recipient to disclosure could mediate the association between HIV disclosure and social support. One study found that adolescents were less likely to disclose their HIV status to their main partner, immediate families, or friends comparing to adults, which may be associated with a lack of social support and corresponding isolation (O’brien et al., 2003). Moreover, research about the later self-disclosure indicated there might be a reciprocal connection between HIV disclosure and social support (Perry et al., 1994). -Huang Wenting thesis draft


This + summary word

Until adjustment of the body clock has occurred, individuals suffering from “jet lag” feel tired during the new daytime, yet are unable to sleep properly during the new night. For athletes in particular, this sleep deprivation can affect mood and powers of concentration and might result in poorer training performances and competition results (Reilly et al., 1997b).




Creating Flow




You are competing for readers and for research space

Create-a-Research-Space (CARS) model

3 rhetorical “moves” in research paper Introductions

Genre analysts, such as John Swales, offer models to help us organize our papers.

Genre analysts can find patterns of features present in the parts of a typical research paper.

Think of the first sentence of your paragraph as an umbrella. The first sentence of your paragraph, the topic sentence, is important. It should provide coverage for the sentences that follow. The first sentence begins the thread that runs throughout the paragraph.

Thus, readers expect certain overall organizational patterns. The same is true at the sentence level.

Try this test: Read only sentence 1 of each paragraph of the paper and see if you get the main points.




Creating Flow




Academic Vocabulary ChoicesMake the vocabulary shift . Choose academic vocabulary.

getting bigger and bigger ---- increasing

put up with ---- tolerate (avoid phrasal verbs)

kids ----children (be more formal)

a lot of ---- many

But don’t overdo it!


Dense GRE Vocabulary Alert!

The struggle for freedom and dignity has been formulated as a defense of autonomous man rather than as a revision of the contingencies of reinforcement under which people live. A technology of behavior is available which would more successfully reduce the aversive consequences of behavior, proximate or deferred, and maximize the achievements of which the human organism is capable, but the defenders of freedom oppose its use.B. F Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) as cited in Hairston & Keene, Successful Writing, 2005


Learn High Frequency Academic Collocations

Words that naturally go together in a language.

Examples:

damaging consequences

widespread support

allocate resources

paradigm shift


Using collocations can make your writing sound natural.

“One practical approach to this problem is to enhance hypertensive patients’ medication adherence by integrating family and community interventions in hypertension control.” –Graduate student writer


Resources for learning collocations• Collocation Dictionaries (available in hard

copy and online)

• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) corpus.byu.edu

520 million words of text (20 million words each year,1990-2015) equally divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic texts


Cut extra words and avoid redundancy

Being Concise: Edit this flabby paragraph. More words can be cut.

In my opinion and upon thinking about this recently, I would argue that critical thinking is an important skill and the most important and vital outcome or result of higher education. Many scholars agree and think this idea is correct. Higher education is moving away from the lecture format of presenting facts to be memorized and learned by memory and is becoming more focused on engaging students in active learning and the application of concepts. Traditionally, we thought of critical thinking as the ability to weigh and evaluate arguments and ask questions about conclusions. Now more and more teachers, scholars and professors are currently considering the modern new skills needed for today’s 21st

century learning. The huge amount of specific information and data now available to us in the world requires new skills and tools for the student and learner. We need new skills to handle the increasing amounts of information. A learner must be able to evaluate plans, solve problems, communicate articulately and be creative. Today’s learners must also be able to evaluate their own understanding and must be willing to be a lifelong learner. This is what we now mean by “being a critical thinker.”


Consider these style suggestions:

• Avoid contractions didn’t ---- did not (most fields avoid contractions)

• Use mid-position adverbsThe model was originally developed by Griggs (2010) and was later adapted by the World Health Organization.

Use of negatives (avoid double negatives)

Instead of “Not…any” The analysis didn’t yield any new results, use “No.” The analysis yielded no new results.

Instead of “Not… much” The gov’t didn’t allocate much funding for the program, use “little.” The government allocated little funding.

Instead of “not…many”, The problem doesn’t have many sustainable solutions, use “few.” The problem has few sustainable solutions.




Creating Flow




Citation

Acknowledging the sources of the ideas you are building upon

Distinguishing your own work and your own voice

Making your source use transparent: 3 questions (Pecorari, 2004)


3 Questions to Ask (Pecorari, 2004)

1) Identity of the source: does the reader understand which sources materially influenced the text?

2) Content: does the reader receive an accurate impression of what the source text said?

3) Language: does the reader understand whether the language comes from the source (i.e. whether the writer has used quotation or paraphrase)?

References

Booth, W, Colomb, G. and Williams, J. (2008). The Craft of Research. Univ. of Chicago, 3rd ed.

Gopen, G. and Swan, J. (1990). The Science of Scientific Writing, Scientific American, vol. 78.

Moskovitz, C. (2016). Self-Plagiarism, Text Recycling, and Science Education. Bioscience, vol. 66 No.1 http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org

Pecorari, D. (2008). Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis. London: Continuum.

Swales J. and Feak, C. (2012). Academic Writing for Graduate Students. University of Michigan Press, 3rd ed.

http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org


Thanks!

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Practical English Writing Skills for EFL Writers · PDF fileillness in the previous two years reported lower happiness ... Readers will judge your sentences to be ... the topic sentence,