Academic Writing – The Voice To Communicate With Other Researchers

Research is not only about what you find, but also how to make your research tribe accept your contribution. To do this, it requires some careful thinking about the way we organise and represent our research, which refers to the using of rhetorical device.

Jacobs (2003) "Class Reproduction in Professional Recruitment: Examining the Accounting Profession" serves as a good example of qualitative paper using this writing style.

Introduction is always a critical part of academic paper, which determines whether the readers are captured by your research and have a desire to continue reading (except the abstract). There are two styles of introduction. The first one is “story-telling” which provides some background and summary of prior literature, and then brings out the objective of the current research. The other way is to just start with the goal of this research and then starts to engage with the prior literature. Jacobs (2003, P569) uses the second style, which in my view is more preferable. By stating “ The paper explores… The focus of this paper is…This paper presents a study of….” in the first several sentences of the paper, this gives readers a clear picture of what this paper is trying to achieve. It seems to be a better way to start an academic paper as most of people who read this paper might already have knowledge in the area of your research. If you use half of a page writing something they have already known, this can bore them and make them stop writing your paper. Capture their attention in the first line of your research paper avoid this potential problem.

After capture readers’ attention, it is important to demonstrate you know the field well to carry out the research you are doing. And this is the second step to buy into your research tribe. Jacob (2003) has done a great job by putting several references every time he mentions prior research’s point of view in the introduction. For example, “ Essentially, how accounting techniques and technologies benefit… to oppress workers and the working class (see Armstrong, 1987; Puxty, 1990; Tinker, 1985)”. Another example is in Davison (2009), which summarise the main findings from previous studies in one sentence along with ten plus references (see P885). These are efficient way to show readers that I know what I’m taking about without wasting too much of your ink.

Finally, it is important to realize that the audiences of our papers are academics who have lots of knowledge and perspectives on certain things. Using some rhetorical device to show some courtesy to your fellow researcher can make it easier for them to interpret your research in the way you lead them to. The first things we need to do this acknowledge other researchers’ work. Jacob (2003, P570) uses “ With the critical literature the question of recruitment to the accounting professional has received some attention.” “There has been some effort…”. Showing your politeness can also be achieved using hedges interpersonal metadiscourse. For instance, Jacob (2003, P570) uses “ In fact gender could be….”.

However, it seems to be a difference in using these interpersonal metadiscourses between qualitative and quantitative studies. It is common for qualitative studies to use hedges interpersonal metadiscourse, whereas quantitative studies tend to use rational markers such as, frankly and note that. My supervisor has told me that I should not use indefinitely words, like “it seems like”, “it might be that” in describing my research (since my research is mainly quantitative). It is because it gives people a sense that you doubt your own research or you don’t believe what you have found. As quantitative research are heavily based on number which should be quite discrete, this might give the readers an negative impression on your research. Therefore, it might be wise to tailor make your research to the style of your target tribe or journal rather than sampling following some general rule of writing style.