Intellectual Ambitions and Interests

Highly educated seventeenth-century noblemen and gentlemen frequently studied theology, history, and philosophy privately for pleasure; wrote verse; and acquired libraries, but rarely wrote books and treatises. Chapter 9 builds upon the literary, philosophical, and theological interests identified in earlier chapters and provides the intellectual context for Herbert’s emergence as a respected gentleman scholar and published academic writer. It introduces the scholarly circles with which he was associated in London and Paris, his membership of the European Republic of Letters, and his links with scholarly irenicism. It establishes his scholarly connections with John Selden, William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, Hugo Grotius, Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Tommaso Campanella, Fortunio Liceti, Gerard Vossius, John Comenius, and others. It examines Herbert’s scholarly practices and rebuffs claims that he was a dilettante. It browses the collection of books he accumulated in his substantial libraries in London and Montgomery, which ranged across the academic spectrum from theology, history, politics, literature, and philology through the various philosophical and mathematical disciplines to the natural and physical sciences, jurisprudence, and medicine, but also included works on architecture, warfare, manners, music, and sorcery and anthologies of poetry and books of romance literature. It suggests that Herbert’s scholarship was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity and the need to reduce religious conflict as by a desire to secure personal recognition and approval.

The structure of academic writer identity in L2 book reviews by Russian undergradu-ates: Voice and stance

Introduction. The article focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of academic writer identity. The theoretical aspect comprises the analysis of the Anglo-American bulk of research devoted to the problem of writer identity in the academic written discourse. The purpose of the article is to define the structure of writer identity, its voice and stance. The practical objectives of the study is to investigate the identity of novice academic writers represented in their language choices as well as to describe the mechanism of such choices. In order to accomplish the purpose of the research, three types of writer positioning are distinguished: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Materials and Methods. The theoretical analysis is based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach and Rhetorical Genre Studies as well as recent developments of ESP. The analysis of empirical data has been conducted using the methods of discourse analysis as well as qualitative and quantitative methods of data processing. The study reveals the voice and stance represented by lexico-grammatical means of the English academic written discourse. The conducted experiment introduces the context of ESP and models the situation of the implementation of the genre approach in the Academic Writing course in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is one of the leading technical universities in Russia. The research materials include texts of academic book reviews written in English by Russian undergraduates. Results. The study has revealed the social nature of writer identity determined by the genre hybridity of a book review. It is shown that identification and positioning are in direсt connection with the source text; thus, while choosing a textbook of a general science book, the writer identity is getting to be collective or professional. Depending on the functional style of the source text, the rhetorical markers are changing as well. Thus, while choosing a textbook, students are writing for the teacher and addresses the student audience; at the same time in case of the general science text, the student rises to the level of an expert and addresses the scientific community. The popular science text helps work out the individual voice while the author’s style is changing toward the creative one and the dialogue between the writer and the reader is taking an intimate coloring. Subjectivity markers (adjectives with the negative value, boosters) are getting to be typical for the Russian linguistic and academic culture. Conclusions. The article concludes that constructing the socially-predetermined writer identity is an essential skill for students and academics. The writer identity is fluid and changeable depending on the social context – academic discourse and genre characteristics. The genre of a book review that combines objectivity and subjectivity gives an opportunity to construct writer identity according to the choice of the source text. The writer identity is culturally-predetermined and connected with the standards of Russian linguistic culture, academic rules and traditions of teaching English as a foreign language in Russia.

Academic Knowledge Formation Through Blogs

Blogs are an integral component of blended learning environments in English as a second language (ESL)/English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Although they are used in higher education to promote language learning, their impact on EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development in academic writing is underexplored. Utilizing Hyland's metadiscourse model, this qualitative case study in the Turkish higher education context investigated EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development on blogs. The data were collected via reflective journals, semi-structured interviews and reflective essays. Triangulation and corpus-based analysis of Hyland's metadiscourse markers were used in the data analysis. The findings revealed the EFL preservice teachers' multifaceted and even contradictory academic writer identities on blogs and numerous challenges they encountered regarding their identity displays. This study highlighted a blended and corpus-based futuristic perspective on the exploration of EFL writer identities.

Poetry Writing: A Process of Finding One’s Own Voice

This article presents, in the form of a free-verse poem, the trajectory by which the author discovered how to unleash his voice as an academic writer. The poem describes how the author became completely disillusioned with the processes and products of mainstream academic journals in accounting and business, and how the discovery, by serendipity, of a chapter presenting writing as a method of inquiry, by Richardson and St. Pierre, invigorated his academic career. Then, inspired by a series of letters written by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the author presents a writing process that may be useful for other authors seeking to get rid of the standard academic “non-style” of writing and find their own voices.

Creating the Authorial Self in Academic Texts: Evidence From the Expert’s Style of Writing

This paper reports on an analysis of stance expressions in a 439,490-word corpus of Ken Hyland’s academic prose, encompassing 64 single-authored texts from journals, edited collections and his own monographs. Using WordSmith Tools 6.0, the study aims to find out how this expert academic writer creates his authorial self through stance mechanisms. The results reveal that Hyland’s authorial participation in his discourse is mostly manifested through hedges, somewhat less definitely through boosters, but relatively infrequently by attitude markers and self-mention. The choice of the specific stance devices indicates a preference for detached objectivity when formulating empirically verifiable propositions and a shift towards subjectivity when referring to discourse acts and research methodology. These findings contribute to our understanding of stance-taking expertise in applied linguistics and may thus assist novice writers in the field in a more effective management of their own performance of self in academic prose.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFORMING IN WRITING: AN ANALYSIS OF READ-TO-WRITE PROCESS

<p>Academic writing depends on critical reading. Writers need to read materials to be used as support and evidence in their writing. The writing process of an academic writer mirrors the knowledge transforming model. The link between reading and writing has been established by past studies. The read-to-write process is the academic writing process that writers go through but focused more on the reading activities to prepare for materials to be included in the essay. This study is done to explore the perception of writers in their reading stage (read-to-write process). 176 undergraduates taking academic writing course were randomly chosen to respond to the instrument. The instrument is a 5 Likert-scale with 34 items on topics pertaining to variables found in the knowledge transforming model. Findings reveal that writers take alternative roles and reader and writer in the writing process. Findings also reveal interesting pedagogical implications in the teaching and learning of both academic reading and writing.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/lit/0136/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p><a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3883649"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.3883649.svg" alt="DOI" /></a>

The Critical Situation

Academic writing is the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. In so far as students and scholars approach it in these terms, they often tend to focus on the role of knowledge. Students imagine that they must demonstrate what they know to their examiners (who know more than they do) and scholars imagine that they must communicate what they know to their colleagues (who don’t yet know their results). This is completely understandable since knowledge is at the core of academic work, but both scholars and students sometimes lose sight of the discussion. They think of the discourse as a performance rather than a conversation. In this paper, therefore, I will explore the formation of academic discourse and the building of academic competence in terms of the rhetorical situation (not just the epistemic resources) of academic readers and writers. This shift of focus has some important implications. Academic writing is not merely the communication of ideas or the transmission of facts; much more importantly, it is the exposure of ideas to criticism. The academic writer is not interested in “ideas worth spreading,” to invoke the famous slogan of TED talk, but in ideas worth testing. To sharpen the point, we might say that academic writers are always writing for people who are qualified to tell them that they are wrong. As writing consultants and information specialists, we help scholars and students face this situation squarely.

Academic Writer

Academic Writer is a digital learning tool designed by the American Psychological Association (APA) to enhance traditional learning and teaching methods. Originally launched in 2016 as APA Style Central and rebranded in 2019, APA’s Academic Writer supports curricula requiring the APA style of writing and citation.