Speed - enemy to essay quality

Writing skills are not deteriorating but the quality of student essays is being taxed by part-time jobs and other commitments

Speed is the greatest enemy to the quality of student essays and theses, says Professor John Swales.

Visiting AUT’s School of Languages last month Professor Swales, from the University of Michigan, said most students were combining part-time jobs, and extra-curricular commitments like sport with full-time study, leaving too little time for crafting their essays.

“An academic might spend months crafting an article and re-writing drafts, so it is hard to see how a student can produce their best work if they are writing an essay around all these other commitments, and over a much shorter period of time,” says Professor Swales.

The linguistics professor has spent much of his career studying whether descriptions of grammar – as seen in formal grammar books – have a place in written language, and specifically academic writing.

“It’s very much horses for courses. The kind of writing that you find in textbooks, in research articles, in book reviews, in lab reports all have their own special characteristics. So people, both native speakers and others, need to understand what those characteristics are – what their beginnings are, what their middles are, what their ends are.”

In more recent years, Professor Swales has acted as faculty advisor to the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE).

“In 1997 we decided we needed to know more about spoken academic English and whether academic people spoke like books or spoke like folks in bars.”

MICASE used a software program to analyse recorded lectures and presentations for specific words and phrases and to compare them to academic writing.

“We found that the lecturers were speaking naturally apart from a little bit of technical jargon – at least at Michigan. Obviously that’s good news for the students,” says Professor Swales. “Actually though, the difference in the way lecturers talk and the way texts are written does mean that students have a greater leap to make when they come to interpret their readings.”

Over the last 30 years, Professor Swales says he has not witnessed deterioration in the overall standard of writing but has noticed a trend towards self-promotion in research writing.

“Now the academic world is becoming increasingly competitive and there are checks on productivity, self promotion is creeping into academic writing,” says Professor Swales. “It’s not in all fields, philosophers still write the same but it is apparent in engineering and in computer information science.”

Now Swales says he will use his experience with the MICASE project to look at writing a grammar of academic speech.