Analysis 1: Genre variation in linguistic journal articles (HW_A1)

Expert writing vs. First-year university writing

In this assignment you will examine stylistic variation and practice quantitative analysis and research reporting skills that are crucial to designing and conducting sociolinguistic research. You will compare how authors use different forms in their writing to give it different flavours. It’s an opportunity to practice applying concepts and terminology that you have acquired in this course.

Preparation for this assignment, including examination and discussion of relevant data takes place in class (Sep. 19).

Remember that the lists of hedges, boosters, and evidence markers, as well as the graphs showing their distribution, are in the lecture slides from Week 2. Slides are posted in Quercus.

1. Select one of your previously written academic papers.
2. In it, annotate all hedges, boosters, and evidence markers. Use the protocol developed in class.
3. Write a paragraph comparing your data to the data (from Aull 2015) that we saw in class. Write this paragraph in as academic a style as you can.
4. Include at least one graph comparing (some aspect of) the data from your own paper to some of the data given in lecture (see Week 2 slides, Aull 2015 data).

   Tip: If you keep track of your tallies in a spreadsheet (like Excel or Numbers), you can create graphs from those numbers.

5. Submit your annotated paper, your paragraph, and your graph(s) via Quercus.

This assignment, including all data, is adapted from: Aull, Laura. 2015. First-year university writing: A corpus-based study with implications for pedagogy. Palgrave MacMillan.

 Return to syllabus || Updated 10 August 2022