Writing in Englisch: A Guide for Advanced Learners

One of the most obvious facts about the world we live in is that the written word is everywhere. Every day, more and more people across the globe are being confronted with other people’s writings and are being called upon to produce writing themselves, in their private lives and above all in their professions. Furthermore, as the internationalization of our world continues, so we all are increasingly being faced with the tasks of reading and producing texts in languages other than our own. In particular, the dominant role of English in global communication makes it essential that skill in writing English should be part of the stock-in-trade of all educated people, wherever they live.

At German-speaking universities, most departments understandably demand that written work should be submitted in German: this places fewest communicative barriers between teachers and students and also fosters the German language as a medium of scholarly discussion. In departments of English and in a growing number of science faculties, however, students are being required to do an increasing amount of their written work in English, and other departments outside the Arts faculties, too, are gradually coming to accept work submitted in English. This development may arise from a desire to train German-speaking students to practise communicating in the academic lingua franca or it may form a response to the growing number of visiting students from other countries whose German is not yet sufficient for academic writingacademic writing. It is to all students who need to write term papers in English, for whatever reason, that this book is primarily addressed. We trust that it will also be of assistance to senior academics who wish to publish in English. Last but not least, it may offer fresh insights to professional writers and editors as well as to teachers and students in the senior years of the Gymnasium (grammar school).

The reader may justifiably wonder what is new about this book. After all, there is already a plethora of style guides, composition textbooks and self-help Internet sites giving advice on professional or academic writingacademic writing in English. This book is different in at least two respects. Firstly, while we do offer advice on how to write effectively, our advice is not based on any prescriptive notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ text. Rather, we attempt to offer objective insights into those features of English academic text that may pose problems for the German-speaking writer of English. To take just one example, some style guides intended for native speakers set out fairly rigid rules on nominalizationnominalization, claiming that texts will be easier to understand if the writer uses as few nominalizations as possible. However, as close observation of academic text will show, the situation is far more complex. One reason is that nominalization is a standard feature of academic language; this is just as true for English as for any other European language. As a result, budding academic writers who are anxious to join the academic community have no alternative but to use nominalizations in conformity with academic norms. Another reason is that the choice between a nominal and a verbal constructionconstruction often depends on context. In the following sentence, for example, the noun supersession is clearly preferable to its verbal equivalent supersede, whose use would make the sentence far longer and more complex. This is because the verbs advocate and expect take different complements (e.g. advocate that + subjunctive, expect that + will-future):

Similar observations could be made about countless other points we discuss in this book. In each case, rather than providing prescriptive rules, we aim to provide strategies and exercises designed to help our readers cope with the twin demands of effectiveness and conformity to discoursal norms. The assumption throughout is that a reader who has insight into language, and more specifically into the interplay between function and form, will be able to make the right choices at any particular juncture in a text.

Intimately connected with this is a second feature that sets Writing in English apart from general textbooks on writing: it is geared specifically towards the needs of German-speaking readers. We base all our observations on authentic student and native-speaker texts from various sources, some of them electronic, and we draw on a wide range of research literature, some of which deals with cross-linguistic and cross-cultural difference. We are confident that this corpuscorpus-driven approach has allowed us to describe deviation and error in students’ interlanguage with greater precision than is the case in textbooks which are aimed at a more general audience. In this sense, the present book will be helpful not only to non-native writers, but also to native editors struggling to correct fully formulated texts submitted by German-speaking authors.

It may appear from the foregoing that this book adheres to what Lea and Street (2000) have dismissively dubbed the ‘study skills’ methodology rather than the, to them less reprehensible, ‘academic socialization’ and ‘academic literacy’ approaches. According to Lea and Street, the study skills methodology focuses on “attempts to ‘fix’ problems with student learning” and treats these as “a kind of pathology”. However, we have no qualms about drawing our readers’ attention to ‘surface features’ like appropriate text structure and grammar because, as Raimes (1983, quoted in Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 31) puts it, “many of our students … cry out for rules, for something concrete to monitor their performance with”.1 What Lea and Street seem to forget is that many advanced second-language writers already have a reasonable command of general writing strategies in their first language and that these usually transfer positively to the second language (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 241). Their main worry, therefore, is not the assertion of their ‘identity’ in the teacher-learner relationship. What they are really concerned about is the fact that they cannot attain ‘writing power’ and cannot become members of the academic discourse community before they have mastered the rudiments of their second language, any more than in traditional societies an apprentice was able to wield influence within his guild before becoming a master craftsman.

Part of any induction into a community (in our case, the community of academic writers in English) involves learning the ropes and discovering what is allowed and what is disallowed. Accordingly, we accord attention to the major subgenres between which many students in today’s modular education have to shuttle and discuss the important matter of plagiarismplagiarism. In response to the complaint, echoed in Lea and Street (2000), that teachers have tended to abuse their position of power to impose inconsistent and idiosyncratic requirements, we will provide teachers with a set of accepted practices which they and their students can rely on (at the risk of casting ourselves as authority figures!).

Having ourselves published articles and books in languages other than our own, we are painfully aware of the formidable difficulties associated with writing in a foreign tongue. The non-native writer needs to invest extra time and effort in what is already a lengthy research and publication process. This has led German and other non-English academics to suggest that texts written “for a majority of non-English readers by a majority of non-English authors” do not need to be “fully idiomatic” (Dressler 1977: 4; cf. also Carli and Ammon 2008).

We do not find this line of argument particularly convincing. Since “everything is idiomatic in language” (Hausmann 1997; this informs our Module III), we have to write idiomatically if we want to be understood. We communicate by means of form-meaning pairs such as words (pen), phrases (make a claim, blind spot, spill the beans) and larger chunks of text whose usage has been arbitrarily established in prior communication. Thus, the word combination ‘make a claim’ could theoretically mean ‘invent a claim’, but there is a convention which assigns it the meaning ‘utter an assertion’. There is, of course, nothing that prevents foreign-born writers from using ‘make a claim’ creatively to mean ‘invent a claim’; the snag is that their (unidiomatic) use of the word combination is certain to be misinterpreted by both native and non-native speakers of English. At worst, such a strategy results in texts that are “literal translations from the language of the author concerned, and the reader most competent to unravel the meaning is the one who can first translate them back into that language” (Snell-Hornby 1982: 84). There is thus a very weak case for norm infringements. Once you start turning a blind eye to them, it is difficult to say where to draw the line. But there is also a pedagogic reason for our uncompromising stance on conformity to the norms applied by native users. This is the age-old insight that the lower you set your sights, the less you will ultimately achieve; if we abandon the aim of attaining (near-)nativeness and full idiomaticity, competence levels will continue to slide downwards. Throughout this book we have therefore done our utmost to help our readers to express themselves in clear and idiomatic English.

It is this concern with idiomaticity which also fuels our understanding of what a ‘good’ English text is. We do not view Anglo-American style as being in any way ‘superior’, and agree with Pöckl (1995) that British and American writing gurus may be guilty of “naïve Anglo-American ethno- or glotto-centrism” when they compare their own writing norms with those of other cultures (‘contrastive rhetorics’).2 Pöckl points out that almost all British and American researchers in contrastive rhetorics tend to use positive terms (‘linear’, ‘symmetrical’) for ‘Anglo-American’ style, whereas their descriptions of foreign discursive conventions appear to be loaded with negative implications (‘non-linear’, ‘asymmetrical’, ‘incoherent’). That such a view is partial should be obvious; inverting the black-and-white dichotomy, we might state with equal plausibility that German texts, by virtue of their digressiveness, are versatile and multi-faceted, whereas Anglo-American writing is repetitive and colourless. Equally, German text structure might be likened to that of a “staircase” or “spiral” (Pöckl 1995: 103) leading the writer through ever more complex stages of reasoning to the conclusionconclusion. Viewed from this perspective, English academic styleacademic style will appear like a walk across a monotonous plain.

While the terminology of Anglo-American contrastive rhetorics is undeniably infelicitous, European critics like Pöckl seem to forget that the late Australian researcher Clyne (1987), for example, does not see German ‘Exkurse’ in wholly negative terms. In his view such digressions have discernible and useful functions – such as familiarizing the reader with a theory or providing historical background. This does not mean, however, that such passages should simply be transplanted into English-language texts!

Where Pöckl (1995) clearly goes astray is in his charge that native English readers are ethnocentric because they are allegedly loath to plough through articles that violate Anglo-American norms. Just as foreign-language conversation classes aim to enable learners to function adequately in the target community through adherence to social and linguistic conventions, so it seems only natural to expect non-native writers to try to meet readers’ expectations for a natural-sounding text.

The question of readers’ expectations also brings aesthetic concerns to the fore, concerns which have received insufficient attention in writing manuals. Under the twin pressures of teamwork and time constraints, many students (and even professional academics) neglect even to revise their papers before submission (Pöckl 1995: 105), let alone respond to the exigencies of good style (Chargaff 1986: 108). Unlike many of our contemporaries we believe that careful revision and stylistic honing are integral to the writing process, and in the present book, chiefly in Module IV, we have striven to offer some guidelines on stylistic matters.

Implicit in the foregoing is our belief in the value of language awareness, focus on form, and strategy training – a belief rooted in the growing empirical evidence of the need for consciousness-raising among language learners. Numerous studies have shown that learners fail to notice many important language features unless their teachers resort to some kind of focus-on-form intervention (cf. Norris and Ortega 2000 for a meta-analysis of over 40 studies comparing focus on forms, form and meaning). In this book we therefore discuss a number of lexico-grammatical and textual features of English academic writingacademic writing which learners tend to overlook, such as – to mention two arbitrary examples – the delicate interplay of formal and informal style or the expression of circumstance by means of subject noun phrases rather than prepositional phrases. We also attempt to provide a reactive focus on form by analysing errors made by our students and other writers with a German-speaking background. As James (1998: 241ff.) argues on the basis of Tomasello and Herron’s ‘garden path’ studies, error commission is not irreversible, and systematic correction of errors may yield better results than the often vain attempt to forestall errors.

In other words, we assume that students can learn from their mistakes. But this is obviously not the whole story, for, taken to its logical extreme, such a position would mean that “the more errors we make, the faster we will learn” (James 1998: 242). As stated above, we believe that students should be encouraged to avoid errors in the first place. Profiting from the leisurely pace at which most academic writingacademic writing is produced, they ought to reflect on their behaviour as writers and try to make controlled use of the expressive resources of modern English. Wherever feasible, we therefore offer our readers a wide variety of effective strategies for producing fluent texts, such as strategies for planningplanning and revising overall text organization, strategies for combining sentences and strategies for building noun phrases or collocations. We also take due account of the empirically proven interplay between writing and translation at the word or phrase level (cf. Königs 1990, Smith 1994), for many learners with a German-speaking background continue to think in their mother tongue while they are planning their English texts, and they often jot down German words and phrases which they try to render into English at a later stage in the writing process. This is only too natural, since German-speaking students – including students of English – still do a lot of their reading in their mother tongue, thereby picking up subject-specific terminology and phraseology mainly in German.

The instructional strategies we have used in compiling this book have proved their effectiveness (cf. Zimmermann 1985; Marzano, Pickering and Pollock 2001). The book is organized in such a way as to accommodate various approaches (e.g. cover-to-cover reading or dipping into individual modules). The index will meet the needs of readers who require information about individual words, stereotyped expressionstereotyped expressions or questions relating to the writing process, and the glossary provides definitions of most of the technical termtechnical terms we employ. Each module contains an introductionintroduction and an advance organizer in addition to chapter and strategy summaries. We highlight similarities and differences between English and German and analyse typical specimens of more or less effective writing; and wherever possible, we use graphics or tables to make complex subject-matter more accessible. We also provide ample opportunities for practice, including exercise keys, on the accompanying website (https://www.utb.de/doi/suppl/10.36198/9783838556581); as Hinkel (2004) points out, “the learning of many L2 academic skills, such as writing, reading, vocabulary, and/or essayessay editingediting, is largely a solitary activity”, and interaction with us as authors (by reading this book or attending our classes) cannot replace actual practice at writing.

Our lasting gratitude goes to the hundreds of students whose work we have read and corrected over the years and whose thoughts have found their way into many of our examples. The contributions of Hannay and Mackenzie were partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science within the project “A comparative perspective on the grammar-discourse interface in English, with special reference to coherence and subjectivity”, no. HUM2007–62220.

Dirk Siepmann/John D. Gallagher/Mike Hannay/J. Lachlan Mackenzie