See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/356203604
Demystifying academic writing: Genres, moves, Skills and strategies, Zhihui
Fang. Routledge, New York, NY (2021). xiii+270 pp
Article in System · November 2021
DOI: 10.1016/j.system.2021.102696
CITATIONS READS
0 2,625
1 author:
Zhang Ruijie University of Science and Technology Beijing 12 PUBLICATIONS 58 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Zhang Ruijie on 02 April 2022.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.
System 104 (2022) 102696
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
System journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/system
Book review
Demystifying academic writing: Genres, moves, skills and strategies, Zhihui Fang. Routledge, New York, NY (2021). xiii þ 270 pp
As an EFL teacher and currently teaching first-year EAP courses, I have been looking for an effective method of acquiring and imparting the knowledge and skills of academic writing that are responsive to students’ needs. Teachers new to EAP like myself normally face great challenges in instructing students to produce well-structured, fully functional academic texts because of a lack of solid theoretical understanding of academic language or practical publishing experiences to help the students within the university setting. Undergraduates, graduate students, and even novice scholars with a good command of English also constantly have great difficulties composing effective academic texts. Demystifying Academic Writing Genres, Moves, Skills and Strategies written by Zhihui Fang is a timely work to meet these needs with its linguistically informed and genre-based approach to academic writing. The book contains twelve chapters coherently organized into three sections, preceded by the Preface and followed by two appendices. The three sections constitute a progression, moving from unpacking academic writing (Section I) to writing academic genres (Section II), and finally to maximizing success in writing and publishing (Section III). The preface to the book overviews the purpose and topics covered by the individual chapters. Aiming to “enhance students’ and early scholars’ capacity to write for academic purposes and thus building a successful career in scholarly publishing” (p. xiii), the author highlights two salient features compared to the existing literature on academic writing. The first one is the use of the functional linguistic approach (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), which sees academic writing as a process of making language choices that are functional, appropriate, and effective for genre-specific writing tasks. The second is the authentic samples selected from a wide range of disciplines in colleges such as liberal arts, education, business, journalism and communication, medicine, and fine arts. Fang builds the conceptual understanding of academic writing in Chapter 1 and 2 with an informative discussion on the features and types of academic writing, which helps the readers to discern where to situate academic writing among other writing tasks. Specifically, he suggests the non-dichotomous nature of academic writing, showing that it varies across a stylistic continuum with different degrees of formality, density, abstraction, objectivity, rigor, and structure. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 offer a sufficiently exemplified discussion of skills, strategies, and linguistic resources for academic writing. The author groups them into more reading- dependent skills, such as contextualizing, summarizing, quoting, sourcing, agreeing/disagreeing, and evaluating, and less reading- dependent skills, such as defining, classifying/categorizing, describing, explaining, exemplifying, referencing visuals, comparing/ contrasting, entertaining opposition, recommending, and connecting. Each skill is clearly described and illustrated with many examples. Section II includes six chapters, with each describing a particular staple academic genre often assigned and highly valued in the academic community. They are reading responses, book reviews, literature reviews, argumentative essays, empirical research articles, and grant proposals, moving down the stylistic continuum from informal to formal ones. Within these chapters, Fang leads the readers through each genre with a detailed description of the rhetorical moves, the writing strategies, and linguistic resources, exemplified by sample texts carefully selected from authentic sources. In addition to the basics, Chapter 5 (Writing a reading response) and Chapter 6 (Writing a book review) include reading checklists to help the readers generate the ideas before composing. In Chapter 7 (Writing literature review), where profound content knowledge and analyzing skills are involved, the author presents extra instructions for the recursive process of determining the topic, locating and selecting literature, reading and analyzing literature, and writing the review. Similarly, in Chapter 8 (Writing an argumentative essay), the author adds suggestions about collecting and evaluating evidence and elaborates on three styles of arguments, the Rogerian style, the Aristotelian style, and the Toulmin style argument. Chapter 9 focuses on the complex task of writing an empirical research article. It includes examples from quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies. In Chapter 10, the author addresses the process of developing a grant proposal, which pertains not only to academic suc cess but also to career advancement. This part of the book is particularly instructive for both college students and EAP teachers with linguistic resources such as authentic samples and sufficient lexical and syntactic structures. Following the description of essential skills and strategies for academic genres, in Section III, Fang provides additional guidance to ensure long-term success in academic writing. In Chapter 11, he proposes that fostering writing habits, reading deeply and widely,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102696 Received 24 September 2021; Received in revised form 2 November 2021; Accepted 12 November 2021 Available online 13 November 2021 Book review System 104 (2022) 102696
developing linguistic awareness, and persevering through the writing process would help promote reading and writing proficiency. To make the product more reader-friendly and accessible, he emphasizes the importance of considering the audience, purpose, organi zation, style, clarity, flow, and appearance when making language choices as well as the need to attend to the nuances and complexities of the cultural contexts. In Chapter 12, Fang finally provides a practical discussion of the knowledge, skills and dispositions that could enhance the chances of getting published, covering issues of the publication process and manuscript review criteria, as well as tips concerning writing motivation, patience and persistence, searching for a publication outlet, valuing feedback, and seeking collabo rations. College students and early scholars embarking on the road of research and publication will find this section extremely informative and helpful as they can readily follow the strategic guidelines to become more proficient in academic writing. The contribution of this book is mainly practical, which is suggested by rich genre-based samples in Section II and the instruction package in Section III. It is also evidenced by reflective and application activities at the end of each chapter to encourage practices for individual uses and within disciplinary contexts. More conveniently, the author sets up in the Appendix section a rating scale to help the readers evaluate their understanding or ability of academic writing and a checklist for the self-assessment of academic writing. Functioning altogether, these resources could efficiently enhance the readers’ academic writing skills and facilitate their progress in the academic community. Another merit of the book is that it is theoretically driven and pedagogically applicable. The author foregrounds the role of lan guage and the nature of making language choices in academic writing following a functional linguistics approach. Academic literacy is regarded here as more than fluency, grammar, or academic vocabulary, but as a meaning-making practice that incorporates vocab ulary, grammar, and text-level processing. Terminologies central to functional linguistics such as “continuum” and “instantiate” (on pages 14 and 37) are brought into the narration to reinforce the essence of context-based meaning-making in the process. As a functional linguistics practitioner and EAP teacher, I already found this functional approach to academic writing instructive in solving some challenging problems in my own classroom, especially concerning the consistent use of academic language and realization of textual coherence. Despite this merit, the author could have explained more on the theories and concepts in functional linguistics to accommodate the readers with the functional approach to academic writing as readers who have an interest in this approach would find the functional insights elusive. Therefore, the book could be enhanced by seeking a trade-off between the theoretical foundations and practical chapters. Another concern is that a majority of the sample texts (especially the longer ones) are from social sciences, which may discourage students or researchers from other disciplines. And it may fail to convince them that the moves, skills, and language re sources are also applicable to the writing in their disciplines. Nevertheless, with its coherent chapters, the rich array of templates, and lucid writing style, this book is undoubtedly a worthy contribution to a growing literature on genre-based academic writing. With the rich resources of moves, skills, and strategies for academic writing, it is likely to engage a wide readership among college students, early researchers, ESL, and EAP teachers.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project [Grant No.19YYB004].
Reference
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar (4th ed.). London and New York: Routledge.
Ruijie Zhang School of Foreign Studies, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China E-mail address: zhangruijie@ustb.edu.cn.
Ruijie Zhang is currently a lecturer at University of Science and Technology Beijing, where she carries out research in functional linguistics and discourse analysis and teaches EAP and academic reading and writing. Her personal interest includes applied linguistics and functional linguistics, especially multi disciplinary works that can be enriched by linguistic analysis.
