Page 301 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

COHESION ANDCOHERENCE 287
(For punctuation rules in parallel simple sentences, see chap. 4.)
The flexibility of the coordinating conjunctions that allows them to con- join practically any types of parallel words, phrases, or sentences is unques- tionably a wonderful characteristic. However, it is this very characteristic
that can cause much turmoil among the parallel syntactic elements and lead some L2 writers into peril when sentences do not seem to end. Another problem with coordinators is that, as mentioned, they are by far the most common and simple of all cohesive devices in English, and no matter how long one's sentences are, they do not fool many people into thinking that their author is a sophisticated writer.
For instance, corpus analyses of spoken and written English have de- termined that and is one of the most frequent words and that it occurs at the rate of approximately 27,000 times per million words. But and so are also fairly prevalent, with rates of approximately 5,000 occurrences each (Leech, Rayson, & Wilson, 2001). Coordinating conjunctions are partic- ularly common when they conjoin parallel phrases and simple sen- tences, whereas but is least frequent in academic text. It is interesting to note that in academic writing slightly over 30% of all occurrences of and conjoin simple sentences, with the large majority of these features found in parallel phrase constructions (Biber et al., 1999). Thus, when it comes to developing cohesion between sentences in formal academic text, em- ploying coordinating conjunctions may not be the most impressiveway to proceed. In fact, as mentioned, L2 writers greatly overuse and, but, and
soto not-so-good effect (Hinkel, 200la, 2002a).Simplyincluding coordi- nating conjunctions in the text without connecting meanings of sen- tences and phrases results in a simple chaining of ideas and a fragmented writing style (Chafe, 1985).
However, the conjunction or finds many more uses in academic writing than in other types of text mostly due to the fact that academic definitions, explanations, and discussions often have the goal of providing descriptions of alternatives and options.
It is necessary to note that correlative conjunctions such as both ... and, ei- ther ...or, and neither... nor, widely popular in the teaching of ESL grammar, are actually rare in any types of discourse, including spoken and/or written (Leech, Rayson,&Wilson,2001). For instance, Biber et al. (1999) foundnor to be far less common than all other coordinators in academic prose. In ad- dition, according to their analysis,both ... and occur with frequency rates of 0.1%, either ...or with the rates of 0.05%, and neither ... nor hardly at all.
The Rigidity of the Parallel Structure
Using coordinating conjunctions that develop cohesion between sen- tences and sentence elements is not without pitfalls. L2 written text often contains various parallel structure errors that are actually relatively easy to
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