Definition and Examples of Academic Prose Styles

Definition and Examples of Academic Prose Styles Academese is an informal, pejorative term for the specialized language (or jargon) used in some scholarly writing and speech. Bryan Garner notes that academese is characteristic of academicians who are writing for a highly specialized but limited audience, or who have a limited grasp of how to make their arguments clearly and succinctly (Garners Modern American Usage, 2016). The Tameri Guide for Writers  defines academese as an artificial form of communication commonly used in institutes of higher education designed to make small, irrelevant ideas appear important and original. Proficiency in academese is achieved when you begin inventing your own words and no one can understand what you are writing. Examples and Observations Dale was not a good writer. Trust me on this. . . . [I]n training to be an academic, Dale was crippled by the need to write in academese. It is not a language formed by any human tongue, and few, if any, academics survive the degradation of it to move on to actual prose.(Dan Simmons, A Winter Haunting. William Morrow, 2002)There is original thought here, but the reader is immediately confronted by the language academics apparently use to communicate with one another. Sometimes it reads like a translation from the German, at others that they are merely trying to impress or indulging in a verbal cutting contest. Here are a few of the words you should be prepared to encounter: hermeneutics, commodified, contextualizing, conceptualize, hyperanimacy, taxonomic, metacritical, rhizome, perspectivizing, nomadology, indexical, polysemy, auratic, reification, metonymic, synecdoche, biodegradability, interstitial, valorize, diegetic, allegoresis, grammatology, oracy, centripetality, and esempla stic.(Stanley Dance in a review of two anthologies of jazz studies; quoted by George E. Lewis in A Power Stronger Than Itself. University of Chicago Press, 2008) Vernacular Equivalents to Academese[E]ffective academic writing tends to be bilingual (or diglossial), making its point in Academese and then making it again in the vernacular, a repetition that, interestingly, alters the meaning. Here is an example of such bilingualism from a review of a book on evolutionary biology by a professor of ecology and evolution, Jerry A. Coyne. Coyne is explaining the theory that males are biologically wired to compete for females. Coyne makes his point both in Academese, which I italicize, and in the vernacular, staging a dialogue in the text between the writers (and the readers) academic self and his lay self: It is this internecine male competitiveness that is assumed to have driven not only the evolution of increased male body size (on average, bigger is better in a physical contest), but also of hormonally mediated male aggression (there is no use being the biggest guy on the block if you are a wallflower). It is this type of bridge discourse that en ables nonspecialists and students to cross from their lay discourse to academic discourse and back. . . .In providing a vernacular equivalent of their Academese, writers like Coyne install a self-checking device that forces them to make sure they are actually saying something. When we recast our point in vernacular terms, we do not simply throw out a sop to the nonspecialist reader, much less dumb ourselves down. Rather we let our point speak itself better than it knows, to come out of the closet in the voice of the skeptical reader.(Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. Yale University Press, 2003) If you cannot write about it so that anyone who buys the paper has a reasonable chance of understanding it, you dont understand it yourself.(Robert Zonka, quoted by Roger Ebert in Awake in the Dark. University of Chicago Press, 2006)Varieties of AcademeseCritics outside the academy tend to assume that academese is one thing, public discourse another. But in fact there are major differences of standards ranging from field to field: what constitutes evidence or valid argument, what questions are worth asking, what choices of style will work or even be understood, which authorities can be trusted, how much eloquence is permitted.(Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Blackwell, 2004)Lionel Trilling on the Language of Non-ThoughtA specter haunts our cultureit is that people will eventually be unable to say, They fell in love and married, let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say Their libidinal imp ulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.Now this is not the language of abstract thought or of any kind of thought. It is the language of non-thought. . . . There can be no doubt whatever that it constitutes a threat to the emotions and thus to life itself.(Lionel Trilling, The Meaning of a Literary Idea. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, 1950) Passive Voice in AcademeseIf your style has been corrupted by long exposure to academese or business English, you may need to worry about the passive. Make sure it hasnt seeded itself where it doesnt belong. If it has, root it out as needed. Where it does belong, I think we ought to use it freely. It is one of the lovely versatilities of the verb.(Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft. Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) Pronunciation: a-KAD-a-MEEZ Also see: Academic WritingBafflegabGobbledygookLanguage at  -ese: Academese, Legalese, and Other Species of GobbledygookRegisterStyleUnder the Flapdoodle Tree: Doublespeak, Soft Language, and GobbledygookVerbiageVerbosity

Text Features in Non-Fiction Informational Texts

Text Features in Non-Fiction Informational Texts Important tools to help students to understand and access information in informational texts are the text features. Text features are both ways in which the authors and editors make the information easier to understand and access, as well as explicit means of supporting the content of the text through illustrations, photographs, charts, and graphs. Using text features is an important element of developmental reading, which teaches students to use these parts to understand and comprehend the content of the text Text features are also part of most states high-stakes  tests. Students in fourth grade and above are usually expected to be able to identify the text features common to most non-fiction and informational texts. At the same time, they help struggling readers find and identify the information they are expected to know in content area classes, such as social studies, history, civics, and science. Text Features as Part of the Text Titles, subtitles, headings, and sub-headings are all part of the actual text, used to make the organization of the information in a text explicit. Most textbook publishers, as well as informational text publishers, use these features to make the content easier to understand. Titles The chapter titles in informational texts usually prepare the student to understand the text. Subtitles Subtitles usually immediately follow the title and organize the information into sections. Titles and subtitles often provide the structure for an outline. Headings Headings usually begin a subsection after a subtitle. There are multiple headings for each section. They usually lay out the major points made by the author in each section. Subheading Subheadings also help us understand the organization of the thoughts contained in the section and the relationships of the parts. Title, subtitle, heading, and subheadings could be used to create guided notes, as they are pivotal parts of the authors organization of the text. Text Features That Support Understanding and Navigating the Text Table of Contents Works of fiction seldom have tables of content, whereas works of nonfiction almost always do. At the beginning of the book, they include the titles of chapters as well as subtitles and page numbers. Glossary Found at the back of the book, the glossary provides definitions of special words within the text. Publishers often place words to be found in the back in boldface. Sometimes the definitions are found adjacent to the text, but always in the glossary. Index Also in the back of the book, the index identifies where topics can be found, in alphabetical order. Features That Support the Content of the Text The internet has given us a rich and easily accessible source of images, but they are still incredibly important in understanding the content of information non-fiction texts. While not actually text it would be foolish to assume that our students understand the relationship between the content and the picture on the same page. Illustrations Illustrations are the product of an illustrator or artist and create an image that helps us better understand the content of the text. Photographs A hundred years ago, photographs were difficult to produce in print. Now, digital media make it easy to create and recreate photographs in print. Now they are common in informational texts. Captions Captions are printed below the illustrations and photographs and explain what we are seeing. Charts and Diagrams Unlike illustrations, Charts and Diagrams are created to represent amount, distance, or other information shared in the text. Often they are in the form of graphs, including bar, line, and plot and whisker graphs, as well as pie charts and maps.