Page 332 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

3 1 8 CHAPTER 12
• infrontofthemainverb,ifthemainsentenceverbisnotbe(allex- amples are from student texts):
Scientists [generally/usually/often] think that byconducting research on human cloning, they will make a betterquality human kind in the future. The definition of workplace competence has [frequently/seldom/occa- sionally] included learning new knowledge and skills.
• after be, if the main sentence verb is be
This definition is [frequently/usually/sometimes] too broad.
The reasonsfor the change are [generally/often] not outside education, but they are connected to it.
In many cases, uses of frequency adverbs are accompanied by the present simple tense.
Possibility hedges can be used as adjectives with nouns (a probable/possible cause/reason) and as adverbs in practically all other constructions (i.e.,with verbs, adjectives, whole sentences, and other adverbs). Such adverbial hedges asprobably,perhaps, possibly, andm (this/that) case are particularly com- mon in formal academic writing (Hyland, 1998), and similar to frequency adverbs, they are lexically and syntacticallyeasy to use. The placement rules of these adverbs follow those for frequency adverbs.
Other types of possibility hedges are more characteristic of the conversational than the formal written register (e.g., by [some/any] chance, hopefully, and conditional clauses employed as cliches as in if
you know/understand what I mean [to say], if you catch/get my meaning/drift, or as everyone/the reader knows).
As with adverbs of frequency, possibility hedges are not particularly com- plicated to teach. For instance, formal possibility hedges can be added to a student's sentences and conversational hedges and overstatements deleted as in (1) and (2):
(1) Statistics is [perhaps] the newest science of mathematics. In our society, it is [probably] used [everywhere] [in many places/for many purposes].
(2) [As everyone knows,] [Good/careful] judgment is [possibly/probably] the most important characteristic of a professional engineer.
In these two excerpts, possibility hedges possibly/perhaps/probably can be employed to reduce the power of broad generalizations and claims made with regard to the universal usefulness of statistics in (1) and the single most important characteristic of an engineer in (2).In addition, the exaggerative adverb everywhere in (1) may not be particularly appropriate in an academic essay, and neither is the reference to common and assumed knowledge as
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