Navigating the Labyrinth of Academic English: A Graduate Student's Diary — Epoche C1
October 15th — turning "unclear argumentation" into something I can act on "Unclear argumentation." My supervisor has now written that phrase, or a close variant of it, on three consecutive chapters of my literature thesis, and this diary is the record of what I did to find out what it names. I can hold a seminar room for twenty minutes on the same material and nobody asks me what I mean. It is the page that defeats me, and the comment in the margin does not tell me what to change, because "unclear" describes the reader's experience rather than anything I can point to in my sentences. The obvious explanation is grammar, and I can rule it out. The sentences parse, the tenses agree, the punctuation is conventional. Whatever is failing happens at a level above the sentence, in the arrangement, and I have no vocabulary for that level. That is the practical problem: I cannot repair what I cannot name. I started from the assumption that this is a talent I lack — that some people write good academic prose the way some people have perfect pitch. I set it down because the rest of this diary is the record of that assumption collapsing. The alternative, which turns out to have a substantial research literature behind it, is that academic English is a genre in the sense applied linguists use the term: not a literary category like the sonnet, but a class of texts held together by a shared communicative purpose and by the expectations of the people who read them. John Swales, whose 1990 study of research articles is the standard statement of this position, pairs the genre with a discourse community — a set of people with agreed public goals, their own channels for talking to one another, and their own specialist vocabulary, who between them decide what counts as a competent text. On that account my supervisor is not reporting a defect in me. He is reporting a mismatch between my drafts and conventions he has internalised and I have not. Conventions can be learnt; perfect pitch cannot. October 22nd — sorting the marginalia, and finding that one of the four complaints is misdescribed This week I did something mechanical. I collected every comment my supervisor has made since April, wrote each on a card, and sorted the cards until the piles stopped changing. Four piles, and the fourth is smaller than the others: Paragraphs with no announced point. A paragraph opens with a piece of evidence or a subordinate qualification, and the claim it is meant to support arrives at the end, if at all. Missing connective work. One sentence follows another with no signal of how the two are related — whether the second is a consequence, an exception, an example, or a change of subject. "Too much passive voice." Circled instances of was argued , has been suggested , is seen to be . Loose word choice. Aspect , factor , relates to , deals with — words that gesture at a relation without specifying it. Three of these survive scrutiny. The third does not, and I want to say so plainly, because I spent a fortnight obediently converting passives into actives and made the chapter worse. The passive is not a marker of bad academic prose; it is a marker of academic prose. Biber and his colleagues, in the Longman corpus grammar of 1999, counted grammatical features across a forty-million-word corpus divided into four registers — a register being a variety of language tied to a situation of use, here conversation, fiction, newspaper writing and academic prose. Passives are several times more frequent in academic prose than in conversation, and academic prose is the register in which they cluster most heavily. An instruction to remove them is an instruction to write less like the genre I am trying to enter. So what is my supervisor actually reacting to when he circles a passive? The answer came from an article the writing centre later put in front of me: George Gopen and Judith Swan's "The Science of Scientific Writing", published in American Scientist in 1990. Their method is to ask not what a sentence means but what readers do with its structural positions. They identify two that carry interpretive weight. The topic position is the opening of a clause, ordinarily the grammatical subject: readers take whatever sits there as the thing the sentence is about, and they use it to link the sentence backwards to what they have just read. The stress position is the material immediately before the full stop: readers give it the heaviest emphasis and read it as the sentence's news. A third principle follows from the first two — the action of a sentence should be carried by its verb, not stored in a noun. This reframes the whole complaint. The passive is a device for choosing what goes into the topic position, and it is the correct choice whenever the grammatical object is the thing the paragraph is about. What makes my drafts hard is that I use it without choosing: the topic position fills up with whatever abstraction happens to be nearest, and the reader loses the thread of who is doing what to whom. Alongside it sits nominalisation — the conversion of a process into a noun, so that "critics marginalised the novel" becomes "the marginalisation of the novel occurred". The nominalised version has emptied its verb and pushed the actor out of the sentence altogether. What I wrote What a reader does with it Revision "A reconsideration of the novel's reception was undertaken by several critics in the 1970s." Takes the sentence to be about a reconsideration ; the critics arrive in the stress position, where the emphasis lands on them by accident. "Several critics reconsidered the novel's reception in the 1970s." The action is in the verb; the actor is the topic. "That the reviews were hostile is well documented." Reads a whole clause before learning what the sentence is about; the news slot goes to well documented , which is not the news. "The reviews were hostile, as the periodical record shows." Hostility now occupies the stress position. "The text