Mechanics of writing

 Hello! This blog is a response to an assigned task by Megha Trivedi ma’am. It deals with the Mechanics of Writing. This blog is based on the recorded video lectures by Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay and Prof. Atanu Bhattacharya. It deals with my learning from the videos. 

Acadmic Writing

Academic writing is a type of formal writing that is used in academic settings such as universities, research institutions, and scholarly publications. The purpose of academic writing is to convey information and ideas in a clear, concise, and organized manner, and to provide evidence to support arguments or claims.

Academic writing is typically characterized by its use of specialized terminology, formal tone, and rigorous methodology. It also often involves the use of citations and references to acknowledge the work of other scholars and to support the writer's own arguments.

Some common types of academic writing include research papers, essays, book reviews, and dissertations. These types of writing typically require a deep understanding of the subject matter, critical thinking skills, and the ability to present arguments in a clear and logical manner.

Non Acadmic Writing

Non-academic writing refers to any type of writing that is not intended for academic purposes or scholarly publications. Non-academic writing can take many different forms and can be written for a variety of different audiences, including creative writing, technical writing, and business writing.

Creative writing includes genres such as fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. These forms of writing are intended to entertain, evoke emotions, and stimulate the reader's imagination.

Technical writing is a type of writing that is used to explain complex technical concepts in a clear and concise manner. This type of writing is often used in the fields of science, engineering, and technology, and is intended to inform and educate the reader.

Business writing refers to any type of writing that is used in a professional or business setting. This can include emails, memos, reports, and other types of documents that are used to communicate within an organization or with external stakeholders.

Overall, non-academic writing is often characterized by its focus on communication and its ability to engage and persuade readers in a variety of different contexts.

Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay talked in the session on Academic Writing. He talked about the importance of linguistic markers to identify formal and informal writing and shared his views on Critical Writing.

1. Formal tone: Academic writing typically uses a formal tone that is objective, precise, and free of emotional or biased language. The tone should be appropriate to the topic, audience, and purpose of the writing.

2. Evidence-based: Academic writing relies heavily on evidence to support arguments and claims. This evidence is typically drawn from reliable sources, such as academic journals, books, and other scholarly publications.

3. Citations and references: Academic writing requires the use of citations and references to acknowledge the work of other scholars and to provide evidence to support arguments. These citations and references should follow a recognized citation style, such as APA or MLA.

Academic writing uses signaling expressions/ linguistic markers which are True, as a result, however, although, because of, etc. it needs to be used significantly and cautiously because it gives a turn to the arguments.

Video :2 Atanu Bhattacharya

Basic principles

1.What not to do

2.What can be done

3.Web tools

4.Case study

Writing tips:

• Writing an introduction of at least
• Create an indexed literature review: whether you use it in your work or not
• Be sure of the triangulated methods (looking at the same sets of data from various approaches)
• Do not repeat the same arguments
• Use available digital tools
• Follow the literature: do an act of writing something new

Making a choice in selecting authentic journals for publication. Web of Science and Scopus are the good ones and one can check out the authentic journals at the UGC Care website, and one can get the Journal rank in it.

The scale in academic writing

Publication scale – recognize journal

Technical terms, huge number of jargons, wide theoretical work

Alan David Sokal

How the problematic research can be painful by example of breast cancer.

A few takeaways

1. Writing has material effects

2. Avoid massive jargonization

3. Research and publication ethics

4. Carefully choose the topic

• Writing it up: a few tips

Create as indexed literature review

Be sure of the triangulated methods

• Do not repeat the same arguments

• Use available digital tools

• Follow the literature

Suggested many helpful digital tools for references as well as language

• Zotero
• Mendeley
• MS Word
• Language help

Types

• Verbatim or rephrasing without acknowledgments
• Inappropriate collaboration
• Other assistance with acknowledgments
• Cheating
• Duplication

Video:3 Atanu Bhattacharya

In this Another  part, he talked about the mechanics of Academic Writing for the specific purpose of Research in English Studies.

1.Triangulation method

2.What are the advantages of the merging two chapters like first of introduction and literature review?

3. humanities and social sciences

4. questionnaire method and its limitations (unreliable)

5. thematic analysis

• Language writing in academic writing

Formulating propositions/ defining

Can, may, often etc.

Whatever we are going to state in our research is not final so we should be with these kind of propositions.

• Swales’s CARS Model

Definition Purposes

JustificationLiterature review

Method 

Argument

Conclusion

• Organizing ideas
• Paraphrasing
  • Avoid repeating yourself. words/ ideas/sentences.
  • Avoid quoting someone else exactly
  • Change your vocabulary
  • Develop Your own ‘Voice’ in your writing

  
  

Introduction

The rational points- why are doing this research? Why this literature is important? how are you interested in that research? What is your position in that research? What is a personal point of interest?

• The thesis statement/ the topic sentence- what the research is about supported by other evidence. The sentence provides an idea of what research is about.

Passivization

The process of changing a verb or sentence into the passive: The subject of the sentence is hard to identify because of passivization. The research included transitive verbs that allow the passivization

Hedging language

The phenomenon of keeping the window open for other possibilities, ideas, and instances is called hedging. Modal verbs like can, may, and verbs like seem, appear, etc helps not to give absolute facts and keep the voice uncertain.

My way of classifying- This way of classifying