{"id":296,"date":"2010-03-06T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T08:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=296"},"modified":"2010-02-10T11:49:15","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T09:49:15","slug":"the-development-of-scientific-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=296","title":{"rendered":"The development of scientific writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
The <\/strong>development of scientific writing:<\/strong> Linguistic features and historical context. By David Banks<\/strong>. <\/strong>London: Equinox, 2008. Pp. 221. ISBN 9781845533175<\/a>. $35.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham<\/strong><\/a>, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey<\/em><\/p>\n

This monograph investigates the development of certain features of scientific writing in texts that date from Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s Treatise on the astrolabe<\/em> (fourteenth century) through to a corpus of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society<\/em>, <\/em>which <\/em>range from 1700\u20131980. This study illustrates diachronic language change and how the context in which scientific writing is produced has shaped the genre\u2019s stylistic features. David Banks conducts his study within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, providing an accessible introduction to aspects of the framework in the introduction.<\/p>\n

B\u2019s analysis and discussion of texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century form the background of the systematic study then undertaken of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions<\/em>. Whereas B limits himself in his linguistic analysis of Chaucer\u2019s Treatise<\/em> (in Ch. 1) to the use of the passive, personal pronouns, and the nominalization of processes, his study of the corpus of texts compiled from the Philosophical Transactions<\/em> also includes thematic structure and, briefly, interpersonal and intertextual elements.<\/p>\n

B\u2019s analysis of scientific articles is accompanied by plentiful excerpts, both to illustrate examples of specific constructions and to portray the respective author\u2019s writing style. In his survey of scientific writing in Ch. 2 \u2018Between Chaucer and Newton\u2019, B notes the evolution that the biological sciences have undergone from being purely descriptive (until well into the nineteenth-century) to becoming more analytical. In contrast, the experimental orientation of the harder sciences has propelled this genre from early on to employ a wide variety of discourse styles to discuss research methods and outcomes.<\/p>\n

The main body of B\u2019s study is found from Ch. 4 onwards, in which B analyses the evolution of certain features of scientific writing. His corpus comprises thirty articles from the physical and biological sciences, selected at twenty-year intervals from 1700\u20131980. B tracks the changing levels of frequency in the use of the passive in the two subdisciplines, noting the relationship between the passive and mental and material processes as well as the use of particular pronouns. Additionally, B provides a quantitative analysis for the use of nominalization and thematic structure, although, the reader might wish for more discussion on how these results may relate to a teaching context (or other fields of applied linguistics).<\/p>\n

The final chapter provides a brief but entertaining discussion on various interpersonal elements, such as references to the ancients<\/strong> and inclusions of correspondence, praise, reference to, or criticism of colleagues and their work. As the use of citations and references to other authors in a writer\u2019s scholarly work has received some attention in recent research on academic writing, further analysis of trends noted in this section might be welcomed.<\/p>\n

Apart from its obvious relevance to those involved in the study of scholarly writing from a diachronic perspective, this text (or parts thereof) may also be met with interest by scientists interested in the evolution of the written scientific genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The development of scientific writing: Linguistic features and historical context. By David Banks. London: Equinox, 2008. Pp. 221. ISBN 9781845533175. $35. Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey This monograph investigates the development of certain features of scientific writing in texts that date from Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s Treatise on the astrolabe (fourteenth century) through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}