Page 264 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

250 CHAPTER 10
In L2 academic writing, there are only a couple of important things to re- member about the placement and punctuation of adverb clauses:
If adverb clauses are placed at the beginning of a complex sen- tence, a comma must be used to separate it from the main clause. No comma is necessary when the clause is at the end of the sentence.
COMMON ERRORS WITH ADVERBIAL CLAUSES
Three Steps Back: Although ... but Errors
The main discourse and contextual function of concessive clauses is to hedge the idea/generalization/statement in the main clause and present a balanced position by accounting for other perspectives:
Although not all communities and groups accept society's institutions, a majority of the citizens in any country do not challenge the social order and accepted social
patterns.
Economic descriptions of buying decision making assume buyers' purely rational purchase decisions, even though many buying decisions have emotional aspects.
To put it simply, concessive clauses play a role analogous to "one step back" and the main clause "two steps forward." In this way, writers advance their ideas/positions gradually and diplomatically, as is usually expected in academic writing, rather than rushing forward (Swales, 1990a).
In L2 writing, however, when writers misunderstand the "one step back" function of concessives, they additionally employ the conjunction butwith main clauses:
*Although managers believe that a worker's salary is everything, but they for- get to think about other benefits.
*Even though art was very important in the 18th century, but it is not so im- portantnowbecausetechnologyiswherethefuture is.
In effect such structures result in one-step-back (although) + two- steps-back (but with the main clause) = three steps back, and the thrust of the writer's main point does not seem to advance.
A common student error is using although/even though and but in one complex sentence. The teacher may have to persistently and em- phatically warn against this use.
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