Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.Comment: 6 figure

Typology of Rhetorical Questions as a Stylistic Device in Writing

This paper is concerned with the use of rhetorical questions (RQs), a stylistic device often not recognized as such. The problem of reading and writing in a second language in Nigeria and also using different styles apart from the conventional style are examined. The paper also focuses on the impact any stylistic choice has on the reader. Specifically, it examines style and the concept of the RQ as well as identifying typology of RQs (about 8 different types), their characteristics and instances of overlap, their purposes and functions in newspapers and other forms of discourse. The idea is to highlight reasons why teachers and writers should spice up and embellish the variety of styles available for use and also point out to readers and writers which types of RQs have been used as well as the purposes, objectives and the writer’s intention in using that particular style. The paper also looks at the sociocultural and extra linguistic contexts of the use of the RQ on the Nigerian literary scene. The typology is presented in tabular form and each type is discussed with examples. The implications of the use of this stylistic device are pointed out for teachers, students, readers and writers

Critical Examinations of the Known and the Unknown in Social Science: Where Do We Go from Here?

If the use of social science assumptions and beliefs is what helped set fields of professional practice on the quest for recognition in the academy, what does the recent outpouring of publications on the limits of science reveal about sociocultural research prospects at the dawn of the 21st century? The last few years alone have witnessed the publication of special journal issues on the scientific wars of the nineties, year long professional association debates on the known and unknown, and new books and online data sources proclaiming the end of social science. Cumulatively, research and commentary on the limits of science offer pessimistic and optimistic arguments about advances in understanding intractable sociocultural problems that center on understanding extraordinary complexity. We come down on the optimistic side, encouraged by possibilities for using heuristic tools to identify propositions and ideologies presented across a variety of interpretive texts written to accomplish the function of expressing interpretations on the known and unknown in sociocultural research

Textual Stylistic Variation: Choices, Genres and Individuals

This chapter argues for more informed target metrics for the statistical processing of stylistic variation in text collections. Much as operationalized relevance proved a useful goal to strive for in information retrieval, research in textual stylistics, whether application oriented or philologically inclined, needs goals formulated in terms of pertinence, relevance, and utility — notions that agree with reader ex- perience of text. Differences readers are aware of are mostly based on utility — not on textual characteristics per se. Mostly, readers report stylistic differences in terms of genres. Genres, while vague and undefined, are well-established and talked about: very early on, readers learn to distinguish genres. This chapter discusses variation given by genre, and contrasts it to variation occasioned by individual choice

Towards Female Empowerment. The New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly and Mary O’Donoghue

The monographic study “Towards Female Empowerment − The New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caítriona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue” analyses in depth the poetry written by four most significant Irish authors born in the 1970s. Together with insightful interpretations of the explored poetry, it offers a new reading of philosophy, social and cultural studies, and psychology connected with the subject matter of women’s empowerment. The book constitutes a thought-provoking debate on the up-to-date issues that need to be critically re-examined and re-thought these days. It is an inspiring reading for people interested not only in Irish poetry but in modern literature in general.I have dedicated this monograph to my Mother whose unremitting and unfailing support “empowered” me to work on this book. Many thanks to my fiancé for not losing faith in me and for his patience. Over the years, while conducting my research on contemporary Irish women’s poets, I have encountered many inspiring and helpful people to whom I am sincerely indebted for their advice, wisdom and encouragement. With regard to this book, my special thanks are directed to Michaela Schrage-Früh, her husband David and Frederic for their hospitality and kindness. I would like to thank Przemysław Ostalski for his help with typesetting of the book, and Richard O’Callaghan Ph.D. for proofreading of the earlier versions of the text. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Jerzy Jarniewicz for inspiring me to read poetry

COMPUTING NUMERICAL IMAGES OF STUDENT WRITING: PERSPECTIVES FROM EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research

Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English

Peer reviewe

The language of critical discourse analysis: the case of nominalization

This article examines the way that critical discourse is written. It does so by considering the concept of nominalization. Critical discourse analysts have suggested that nominalization (along with passivization) has important ideological functions such as deleting agency and reifying processes. However, the language used by critical analysts, as they explore nominalization, is revealing. They tend to use, and thereby instantiate, the very forms of language whose ideological potentiality they are warning against – such as deleting agency, using passives and turning processes into entities. The concept of ‘nominalization’ is itself a nominalization; it is typically used in imprecise ways that fail to specify underlying processes. If critical analysts take seriously their own ideological warnings about nominalization and passivization, they need to change the standard ways of writing critical analysis. We need to use simpler, less technical prose that clearly ascribes actions to human agents