Full Description
Academic Writing is a unique introduction to the subject. As the author puts it in her preface, "this book develops from a strong claim: namely, that style is meaningful." In developing that theme, the author draws meaningfully on theory, especially genre theory, while remaining grounded in the particular. Giltrow presents and discusses examples of actual academic writing of the sort that students must learn to deal with daily, and to write themselves. As newcomers to the scholarly community, students can find that community's ways of reading and writing mysterious, unpredictable and intimidating. Academic Writing demystifies the scholarly genres, shedding light on their discursive conventions and on academic readers' expectations and values. Throughout, Academic Writing respects the student writer; it engages the reader's interest without ever condescending, and it avoids the arbitrary and the dogmatic.
The book also offers abundant exercises to help the student develop techniques for working productively at each stage of the scholarly writing process; mastering and summarizing difficult scholarly sources; planning; and revising to create good working conditions for the reader.
The third edition of Giltrow's extremely successful book incorporates extensive revisions that integrate the theoretical perspectives of genre theory into the whole of the book in a more organic fashion; the changes are designed to make the book both more attuned to scholarly practice and more accessible to the undergraduate student.
Giltrow's Academic Reading is designed as an accompanying reader for Academic Writing
Contents
Preface
1 Introducing Genre
1A Hearing Voices
1B Hearing Genres
1C High-School vs. University Writing
1D The University as Research Institution
2 Citation and Summary
2A Introducing Scholarly Citation
2B Is Citation Unique to Scholarly Writing?
2C Why Do Scholars Use Citation?
3 Summary
3A Noting for Gist
3B Recording Levels
3C Using Gist and Levels of Generality toWrite Summary
3D Establishing the Summarizer's Position
3E Reporting Reporting
3F Experts and Non-Experts
4 Challenging Situations for Summarizers
4A High-Level Passages
4B Low-Level Passages
4C Summarizing Narrative
5 Readers Reading I
5A Who Do You Think You're Talking To?
5B Traditions of Commentary on Student Writing
5C An Alternative to Traditional Commentary:The Think-Aloud Protocol
5D Adapting the Think-Aloud Protocol in theWriting Classroom
5E Reading on Behalf of Others
5F Reliability of Readers
5G Presupposing vs. Asserting
6 Orchestrating Voices
6A Making Speakers Visible: Writing as Conversation
6B Orchestrating Scholarly Voices
6C The Challenges of Non-Scholarly Voices
6D Orchestrating Academic Textbooks and Popular Writing
6E The Internet
6F Research Proposals
7 Definition
7A Dictionaries
7B Appositions
7C Sustained Definitions
7D The Social Profile of Abstractions and TheirDifferent Roles in Different Disciplines
8 Introductions
8A Generalization and Citation
8B Reported Speech
8C Documentation
8D State of Knowledge and the Knowledge Deficit
8E Student Versions of the Knowledge Deficit
9 Readers Reading II
9A Think-Aloud and Genre Theory
9B The Mental Desktop
10 Scholarly Styles I: Nominal Style
10A Common and Uncommon Sense
10B Is Scholarly Writing Unnecessarily Complicated,Exclusionary, or Elitist?
10C Nominal Style: Syntactic Density
10D Nominal Style: Ambiguity
10E Sentence Style and Textual Coherence
11 Scholarly Styles II: Messages about the Argument
11A Messages about the Argument
11B The Discursive I
11C Forecasts
11D Emphasis
12 Making and Maintaining Knowledge I
12A Making Knowledge
12B Method Sections
12C Qualitative Method and Subject Position
13 Making and Maintaining Knowledge II
13A Modality
13B Other Markers of the Status of Knowledge
13C Tense and the Story of Research
14 Conclusions and the Moral Compass of the Disciplines
14A Conclusions
14B The Moral Compass of the Disciplines:Research Ethics
14C The Moral Compass of the Disciplines:Moral Statements
Glossary
References
Subject Index
Index of Researchers Cited
