Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

Appendix
Afterword

Except for several examples in the “Things to Try” sections (which I wrote myself), all unreferenced quotations in this book come from a corpus of one thousand recent articles drawn from peer-reviewed journals in ten academic disciplines across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities (one hundred articles per discipline). The articles appeared in the volumes/issues listed below. Out of courtesy for authors whose work is unfavorably cited, I have not disclosed full citation information here (except in one case where I was required to do so for copyright reasons). However, all of the articles in the corpus are available electronically and can be located via an Internet search.

For eight of the ten disciplines, I selected the twenty most recent articles from each of five different journals. The two exceptions are in psychology, where I chose the five most recent articles from each of twenty journals, and higher education, where I chose the fifty most recent articles from a single journal (Studies in Higher Education) and ten articles each from five additional journals. In each of the ten disciplines surveyed, the journals were chosen to represent a broad cross section of well-regarded peer-reviewed publications, based both on peer recommendations and objective measures of peer esteem. As a general rule, I opted for journals with high impact factors (where such ratings were available) and took care to include publications from a range of international locations. However, it is important to note that no given set of five journals from a single discipline—or even from twenty journals, as with my psychology sample—can be considered fully representative. Academics invariably have their own, sometimes idiosyncratic, lists of “the most important journals” in their fields or subfields. My data set provides a selective snapshot of disciplinary scholarship in the early twenty-first century, not a definitive panorama of the infinitely complex and varied landscape of academic endeavor.

Comments on chapter 2

To generate the stylistic data and statistics graphed in Figures 2.1 and 2.2, I worked with a research assistant to analyze five hundred articles from the corpus described above: fifty articles from each discipline, using the ten most recent articles from each of the five journals surveyed. (For psychology, we used five articles each from ten journals; for higher education, we used ten articles each from every journal except Teaching in Higher Education.) We established precise criteria for each stylistic feature and frequently cross-checked each other’s judgments.

For the statistics in Figure 2.1, we looked only at the first one thousand words of each article, not counting quotations and citations:

• Personal pronouns refer only to the first-person pronouns I and we, except where we is used impersonally (“from these results we surmised”) rather than in reference to the authors (“we analyzed the data and found”).

• Unique or hybrid structure means that the article has a structure that significantly diverges from the conventional IMRAD (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion) model and its variants.

• Engaging title/engaging opening indicates that the title or opening paragraph employs one or more of the following attention-getting strategies: a quotation, question, pun, anecdote, provocative statement, unusual turn of phrase, or literary device such as alliteration, metaphor, or wordplay.

• Common abstract nouns are nominalizations formed using any of the following suffixes: -ance, -ence, -ity, -ness, -ion, -ment, -ism.

• Be verbs include is, am, was, were, are, be, been.

For the citation statistics in Figure 2.2, we counted the number of items in the citation list for each article. Where a citation list did not exist, we counted the number of footnotes, not the full number of references cited.

Comments on chapter 3

The bibliographic survey described in Chapter 3 was conducted by an undergraduate researcher, Louisa Shen, with the support of a ten-week summer research scholarship from the University of Auckland. Louisa describes her methodology as follows:

At the outset, I compiled a large Endnote Bibliography of more than 500 writing guide titles as a reference point. Next, I established seven disciplinary categories and chose 12 recent titles for each category (all published between 2000 and 2010) to make up 84 guides in total. I selected for analysis books aimed at graduate students and/or established academic researchers. Where guides written exclusively for this demographic were not available, I chose books that targeted both undergraduates and postgraduates. If the guide did not indicate its intended audience, I made a judgment call on its “academic level” based on whether it dealt with writing for research and publication. No guides that were solely for undergraduates made my short list, even though such texts constitute most of the writing guides field. I then analyzed each selected guide for style and content and generated a report (on average 16—18 pages) for each of the seven disciplinary categories. I also produced a short summary of each guide for the annotated bibliography. The data was then collated into graphs to show trends, and I completed a percentage breakdown of the findings.

At a later stage, Louisa reclassified the writing guides into four overarching disciplinary categories—arts and humanities, science and engineering, social sciences (including business and economics), and generic—and added to her bibliography sixteen additional books, including several well-known writing guides that, while not necessarily aimed at advanced academic writers, might very likely be found on academics’ bookshelves: for example, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Zinsser’s On Writing Well, Williams’s Style, and Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words. This brought the total number of writing guides to one hundred (twenty-five guides per category). The statistics quoted in Chapter 3 and elsewhere throughout this book refer to the full one hundred—guide sample.