Pixel International Conferences

Successful academics and professionals need to master linguistic and text-rhetoric skills that have the potential to make disciplinary knowledge accessible to the all sectors of society [1]. Some scholars define writing as “an important feature of a discipline’s identity” [2], which foregrounds content-related language and linguistic challenges in discipline-specific academic discourse. Academic writing support turns, under the circumstances, into a vital component of the disciplinary expertise acquisition and sharing processes. The EXPRES corpus (Corpus of Expert Writing in Romanian and English) [3] is such a digital support tool: the corpus is composed of research articles in the disciplines, compiled using online resources. The profile of the corpus is “expert writing corpus” since all articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The EXPRES corpus has a dedicated corpus query platform which allow for the search and extraction of desired linguistic items (words, phrases, patterns, n-grams) and statistical visualizations of data. Starting from the assumption that “good writing” [4] can be linguistically stimulated, we used corpus specific research methods to extract linguistic patterns that can be useful in the process of academic paper writing. The extracted patterns are distributed into discipline specific patterns and general academic writing patterns. At the same time, as EXPRES is a Romanian-English bilingual corpus, all the linguistic outcomes also have language specific distributions and descriptions. The paper exemplifies and highlights the potential of using expert corpora for improving academic paper writing.

Keywords: good writing, academic paper writing, EXPRES corpus, expert writing linguistic patterns

References:

[1] Homepage. DACRE project webpage. Accessed 03 March 2022, <https://dacre.projects.uvt.ro/?lang=en>;

[2] Costley, T.; Flowerdew, J. “Introduction”. In J. Flowerdew & T. Costley (eds.), Discipline-specific writing. Theory and practice, 2017, Routledge, pp. 1-11.

[3] Rogobete, R.; Chitez, M.; Mureșan, V.; Damian, B.; Duciuc, A.; Gherasim, C.; Bucur, A.-M. “Challenges in compiling expert corpora for academic writing support”. Conference Proceedings, 11th International Conference the Future of Education, Virtual Edition, Florence, Italy, Filodiritto Editore, 2021, pp. 409-414.

[4] Băniceru, C.; Tucan, D. “Perceptions about “Good Writing” and “Writing Competences” in Romanian academic writing practices: A questionnaire study”. In M. Chitez, C. Doroholschi, O., Kruse,  Ł Salski,, & D. Tucan (eds.), University Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Tradition, Transition, and Innovation, Springer, 2018, pp. 103-112.