Page 338 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

324 CHAPTER 12
with other types of hedges discussed earlier. For instance, with practicees- sentially, nearly, and slightly can be accessible to learners who can use basically,
2 almost, and a little bit.
CONVERSATIONAL AND INFORMAL HEDGES
Lexical hedges represent a simpler variety prevalent in conversational and informal register that is often characterized by vagueness (Channell, 1994), and they have not been found in written academic corpora.
actually anyway in a way
kind of maybe like
more or less more
pretty sort of something
like
Informal Lexical Hedges Not Employed in Academic Prose
Informal lexical hedges are often considered inappropriate in formal ac- ademic writing, although individual instructors may be somewhat flexible with regard to their uses. According to Kay (1997), lexical hedges includes prepositional modifiers of nouns, verbs, and whole sentences that are par- ticularly vague and mark a shortage of factual information or knowledge. For example,
Before this turning point fin the history of industrial production], everything was sort of undefined and sporadic. They just ran production using their own intuitions withamoreorlesssuccessfulmanufacturing....Asaresult,lotsofcreationscouldnot be accomplished. This kind of working didn't hurt companies because there were not many competitors tosharethemarket. (From a student paper on the history of in- dustrial production.)
The uses of such hedges as sort of kind of, or lots in a formal academic as- signment may actually create an impression that the writer is onlyvaguely familiar with the subject matter and is unable to cite specific information to make his or her text credible. The prior excerpt demonstrates that the stu- dent has a general idea of the history of industrial production, but did not make much effort or take the time for an in-depth study of the material. (See also Suggestions for Teaching at the end of the chapter.)
2
Trying to teach semantic variance between such hedges as essentially and basically is not
worth the time it takes for both the teacher and the student. In almost all cases, these and other hedging devices are interchangeable and should be used to avoid redundancy rather than ex- press fine nuances of meaning.
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