Concordancing Yourself: A Personal Exploration of Academic Writing

• Autores: David Coniam
• Localización: Language awareness, ISSN 0965-8416, Vol. 13, Nº. 1, 2004, págs. 49-55
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This exploratory study involves the construction and analysis of a corpus of an individual's own academic writing. Following an examination of the area of academic writing and the position of academic writing corpora within it, the paper discusses how a 'personal corpus' might be put together, along with issues of the necessary quality and quantity of 'text', and problems which may arise in the construction of a personal corpus. The paper also proposes a background, general 'reference', corpus against which features of academic writing may be measured. Despite its limitations, the most usable tool for the small-scale researcher remains the concordancer. Some limited analyses of lexical, syntactic and discourse features are then presented to show how a potential personal profile might emerge. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations facing the analysis of one's own writing, but suggests that, despite limitations, worthwhile insights can be gained in respect of one's personal language awareness.