Page 307 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

COHESION ANDCOHERENCE 293
In formal academic prose, the rate of sentence transitions is the highest among other types of written or spoken genre. However, sentence connec- tors account for less than 10%of all adverbials in the academic register. In addition to these facts, an interesting finding made by Biber et al. (1999) is that conversational discourse employs far more sentence transitions than academic writing does.
In academic writing, the most frequently encountered sentence tran- sitions are actually notfirst(-ly), second(-ly), third(-ly), or moreover as un- doubtedly many teachers have noticed in their students' writing. In fact by far the most common sentence transitions deal with contrast and con- cession (e.g., however, on the other hand, instead, nevertheless), as well as enumerative, additive, and summative meanings (Tadros, 1994) such as to begin with,for one thing, in addition, further, also, similarly, in sum, tosum- marize, all in all, and overall.The most common transitions number fewer than half a dozen.
The Most Common Sentence Transitions in Formal AcademicWriting (in declining order)
however thus therefore then so
According to corpus analyses by Biber et al. (1999), the most frequent sentence transition however occurs at the rate of 0.10%, followed by thus and therefore at the rates of 0.07% and 0.06% per million words, respec- tively. Other sentence connectors found in academic texts include first, fi- nally, furthermore, hence, nevertheless, rather, yet, in addition, on the other hand, and that is, all of which are encountered at frequency rates of 0.01% each. To put it simply, in formal academic writing, sentence transitions are actu- ally not common at all.
COMPLEX PREPOSITIONS AND OTHER ALTERNATIVES
In general, the syntactic function of prepositions is to express a relation- ship between two entities; in this way they are similar to coordinating conjunctions and sentence transitions, which mark a relationship be- tween ideas in two sentences. Complex prepositions are those that con- sist of more than word—usually of two or three words (e.g., asfor, except
for, in line with).
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In their research-based textbook for advanced academic writers at the graduate levels, Swales and Peak (1994) similarly reported that the uses of the following sentence transitions may be useful: however, thus, also, in addition, finally, therefore, on the other hand, then, and neverthe- less. Based on these findings, these authors further pointed out, for example, that "conclusive" sentence transitions such as in conclusionare rare indeed.
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