Academic writing: A comparison between Argentina and the US

LAURA MARINA COLOMBO

Baltimore

Jornada; MLL-INCC Research Day; 2005

Modern Languages and Linguistics Department, Intercultural Communication Master´s Program, University of Maryland Baltimore County

 Writing plays a vital role in academia regarding the building and spreading of scientific knowledge. Competent members of academic communities are expected to produce appropriate written texts. The appropriateness of academic written texts depends on context. In different cultures, there exist different ways in which authors conceive the contextual expectations of their audiences, resulting in different ways of producing and communicating scientific knowledge. The paper analyzes, under a pragmatic framework, the persistence of cultural differences between the U.S. and Argentina´s contextual expectations regarding academic written texts. In order to achieve this, I first describe how each cultural context conceives the production and communication of scientific knowledge. Then, I apply pragmatic concepts as well as data found in previous research about Spanish and English writing styles to the relationship established between reader and writer in each context. I focus in the Humanities and Social Sciences field and provide examples extracted from published research papers in educational science journals.