Tell me where you write and I´ll tell you how you do it: Academic writing in the US and Argentina

COLOMBO, LAURA

Baltimore

Jornada; MLL Research Day; 2005

Modern Languages and Linguistics Department, 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 and their appropriateness 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. This work analyzes, under a pragmatic framework, the persistence of cultural differences between 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 from previous research about Spanish and English writing styles to the relationship established between reader and writer in each context. I focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences and provide examples extracted from published research papers in educational science journals.