Page 314 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

300 CHAPTER 11
formal writingfrom their L1sand employ them to excess (G.Taylor &Chen, 1991; Wong, 1990).
On the whole, L2 writers should be strongly discouraged from us- ing rhetorical questions in formal academic writing.
As Williams (2002) astutely commented, asking questions may be a bit dangerous because they can invite a wrong answer.
Presupposition Words and Phrases
Presupposition markers such as obvious, obviously, and of course are used to re- fer to assumptions that the writer believes to be common knowledge, widely known facts, and universal truths (and, in this sense, they are pre- suppositional; e.g., Of course, if children watch violent TV shows, they becomevio- lent or Obviously, Exxon should pay for the cleanup because they were the ones who spilled theoil). Halliday and Hasan (1976) noted that in formal writing these markers imply a slightly adversative force because they suggest that some- thing is or should have been obvious, but may have been overlooked. Sinclair (1991) explained that the uses of of course have become largely idi- omatic in spoken English because it functions as a one-word marker similar to other vague cliches that refer to assumed presuppositions.
Presupposition markers and similar references to universal truths make written texts particularly prone to misunderstandings and negative evalua- tions (Chafe, 1994; Moon, 1998). In academic and composition writing in English, of course and obviously often indicate flawed organization of infor- mation into given and new because in the Anglo-American rhetorical tradi- tion the writer's responsibility for text clarity and minimal shared knowledge is customarily assumed (Tickoo, 1992).
Presupposition words and phrases such as obvious, obviously, and of course should be avoided in formal academic writing.
PUNCTUATION OF COHESIVEELEMENTS
In English academic writing, about a dozen punctuation rules make up the relatively rigid basics. An academic text written without using them can ap- pear ungrammatical no matter howwell it adheres to the rules of the Eng- lish sentence structure. In all languages, punctuation rules are largely based on convention; for this reason, they may seem somewhat random and hap- hazard to L2 writers who were not exposed to them from the time they be- gan reading. One of the outcomes of this view can be L2 writers' tendency to ignore punctuation rules altogether, with the exception of capitalization and periods, on which most writing teachers insist.
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