March 2005 — Volume 8, Number 4
Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential tasks and skills, Second Edition
John Swales and Christine Feak (2004)
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Pp ix + 331
ISBN: 0-472-08856-4 (paper)
The success of the first edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students can be attributed to the fact that it filled a particular niche: the need for a book on L2 writing in English in university settings that actually took language seriously. This second edition builds on the first, in that it maintains the useful focus on discourse and genre, exploring the types of organization and characteristic functions found in academic texts. But within these parameters, the book has also been thoroughly revised, the range of sample texts has been updated and broadened in scope, and ongoing changes in the nature of academic writing for graduate students have been taken into account. I shall begin this review by outlining the aims and contents of this new edition of the book, then move on to an evaluation against the broad panorama of L2 writing research.
Academic Writing for Graduate Students is targeted at students whose first language is not English, and who need to write academic papers of various kinds in English as part of their post-graduate studies. In this, it is evidently directed first and foremost towards students such as those whom Swales and Feak themselves teach at the University of Michigan, but is also useful to those of us working on English-medium or bilingual postgraduate programs in the European context.
The book is divided into eight units, the first three of which are essentially preparatory, focusing on basic academic style, general-specific and problem-process-solution texts. The next three units are more specific, dealing with data commentary, summaries and critiques. The last two units of the book demonstrate how these different text-types knit together into the full-length research paper, and as such are particularly useful. There are also four rather heterogeneous appendixes, which deal with use of the article, Latin phrases, E-mail and a sample mini-project.
Of all the units, the first is particularly useful as a brief introduction to what academic writing is all about. This unit would stand on its own as a starter module for writing courses, since it homes in on precisely the types of misunderstanding that many L2 writers fall prey to when they embark on the painful transition into prose. One legacy of communicative methodologies is that students are becoming increasingly proficient in the spoken language while remaining unaware of the conventions that operate in writing (Hinkel, 2002). This unit breaks students gently into notions of audience, purpose, organization and style, while offering a user’s guide to the lexical and grammatical means by which a formal written style is achieved.
The other unit which I particularly appreciated focused on writing critiques, which is a daunting task for many L2 writers, whose previous academic experience may have equipped them poorly for taking a personal stance and presenting themselves as “a kind of authority” (p. 191). Swales and Feak provide a full-scale example of an article to be analyzed, with draft critiques and reaction papers, so that the process of critique can be modeled and evaluated in the classroom.
In all of this, Academic Writing for Graduate Students has undergone a fairly thorough metamorphosis since the 1994 editions, particularly with regard to the source material used. The book draws on a wider range of disciplines, such as nursing, marketing and art history; authentic recent data are now used where possible; and the book has kept apace with new findings from discourse analysis, particularly concerning the inter- and intra-disciplinary variations in the structure of research papers. [-1-]
From the point of view of classroom use, the book abounds with useful exercises for students to gain awareness of stylistic and generic conventions, and to practice various aspects of academic writing. On the whole, this is a valuable book which should be on the shelves of every writing center. However, in my experience the Swales approach is not without problems, partly because the focus of the book is so broad (one is never entirely sure whether the book is written for teachers, for students in the classroom, or for dedicated self-starters), and partly because of the amount of time needed to do justice to the material. One problem that arises here is that many students with a good intermediate level of English require more grammatical and lexical back-up of a general nature, and may become frustrated by the book’s very specific focus, whereas students who already have a good enough command of the written language often lack the time and patience to work systematically through a textbook of this kind. In this sense, it is probably useful for teachers in some contexts to regard books such as this as a resource rather than a textbook, or to use parts of it in conjunction with other types of writing practice.
With regard to current issues in L2 writing, it is evident that Swales and Feak are anxious to distance themselves from the prescriptive-proscriptive end of genre-based teaching, despite their evident reliance on the tools of discourse and genre analysis. Although they clearly share some of the underlying principles of genre pedagogies, namely that L2 writers should be empowered to use language effectively in real-world situations, and that giving them access to “occluded” genres may aid in this process, they try hard to avoid simplistic formulae and “recipes” for writing. In the introduction to the new edition, Swales and Feak ward off criticism from the angle of New Rhetoricians and critical pedagogies by saying that their book is “as much concerned with developing academic writers as it is with improving academic texts” (p. 2). In the decade that has elapsed since the first edition was published, we have all become increasingly aware of the problems caused by reifying the text, fossilizing the genre and inducing L2 writers to ventriloquate L1 voices (Belcher, 2004). For this reason, Swales and Feak are at pains to emphasize the need for learners to “apply their analytical skills to the discourses of their chosen disciplines and to explore how effective academic writing is achieved” (p. 2).
The difficulty here, faced by those of us at the rock face of L2 writing, is that students–particularly those from the “hard” sciences–are often unhappy with uncertainty, and lack the necessary skill and interest to become ethnographers of their own field. Although it would be ideal for every would-be research scientist to compile substantial corpora of material from their own discipline, study them thoroughly with the aid of books like Academic Writing for Graduate Students, and draw on the results when composing their own papers, this vision is somewhat utopian. Real research students, pressed for time and pushed to the limit linguistically, are likely to fall back on cutting and pasting from the bibliography, or working in a relationship of informal apprenticeship with more experienced members of their team (Hyland, 2002). It remains for writing teachers to make pragmatic decisions as to how much to teach, how prescriptive to be, and how much to trust to the shaping forces of the real discourse communities which their students aspire to enter.
References
Belcher, D. (2004). Research in teaching writing. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24, 70-106.
Hinkel, E. (2002). Second Language Writers’ Text: Linguistic and Rhetorical Features. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourses Æ Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Ruth Breeze
Universidad de Navarra
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unav.es>
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