Academic Writing Workshop (2)

Editing

Institute of English, University of Silesia April 28th, 2009

Plans for AWW meetings

• In-text citation, list of references

• Main text editing, quotations

• Organisation and planning

• Peer reviewers’ comments

Helpful sources

• Turabian, Kate L. 1996. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations. 6th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Wolański, Adam. 2008. Edycja tekstów. Praktyczny poradnik. Warszawa: PWN.

• http://www.ikila.us.edu.pl/

Font• The same type of font should be used throughout the text, the default

being Times New Roman;• The standard font size for normal text is 12;• Smaller font (TNR 10) is used for footnotes and block quotations,

often also for itemised lists, references and captions to tables and figures

• Suggestions for titles and subheadings (there is no period at the end of a title or subheading):

This is the title of the text (TNR 14, bold, centred)

1. This is a first-level section of the text (TNR 12, bold, left-aligned)

1.1 This is a second-level section of the text (TNR 12, bold, left-aligned, italicised)

1.1.1 This is a third-level section of the text (TNR 12, left-aligned)

Discussing the epistemic meaning of MUST, Coates (1983: 41) suggests that it should be viewed along a cline extending from the subjective core MUST of the ‘I-confidently-infer-that-x’ type to the objective peripheral MUST of the ‘in-the-light-of-what-is-known-it-is-necessarily-the-case-that-x’ type. Coates lists the following features of the core epistemic must:

a) Main predication refers to state or activity in the present or past (must have).

b) Subject is frequently inanimate . . . c) Verb is usually stative.d) Speaker expresses confidence in truth of utterance. (Coates,

1983: 42) 

As regards the peripheral meaning of MUST, Coates (1983: 43) adds also (rare) instances of 

e) reference to states and activities in the future; andf) lack of speaker’s involvement with MUST expressing pure

logical necessity.  

Spacing

• Double-spaced or 1.5-spaced: All the basic text.

• Single-spaced: Block quotations;

Footnotes (leaving a blank line between notes);

Itemized lists;

Examples if set off from the text;

Lists of references (leaving a blank line between entries);

Runover lines in tables of contents, lists of tables and figures, etc.

Paragraphs• No blank lines between paragraphs should be left;• The first line of each paragraph should be indented from the

left margin by approximately 1.25 cm;• Paragraphs should be justified;• At least one blank line should be left before a new

subheading;• At least one blank line should be left after the title;• Unindented should remain:

Block quotations;Titles and subheadings;Captions to figures;The paragraph immediately following a title, a subheading, a figure, a block quotation, a blocked example etc.

1. Introduction Inspiration for this paper came from an anecdote – a saying attributed to Władysław Gomułka, the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party in the years 1956-1970, famous for his widely unfortunate and often ill-

considered statements. While addressing the public during a propaganda meeting, Gomułka was to say: “Yesterday we were standing on the edge of a cliff. Today we have taken a step forward.” This prompted a reflection on cases where figurative language misses the point, that is where the intention of the producer of a metaphorical utterance and the effect of the utterance on the audience do not tally.

  

The aim of this paper is to look into metaphor as a source of unintentional verbal humour. First, the general mechanisms of humour in language will be reviewed; next, a brief survey of linguistic devices for the comic will be presented; finally, some instances of comic-generating interference between metaphor and the co-text will be discussed. Although in certain contexts and for other purposes the distinction between humour and the comic may be worth upholding, throughout this discussion the terms will be used interchangeably.

 

Tables, figures and graphs

• They should be numbered consecutively throughout the text;

• Each should have a caption;

• In tables, columns and lines should have headings;

• A legend should be attached if necessary to clarify the structure of a diagram;

• If they are taken from another text, a clear reference must be given as appropriate.

Fig. 1. EMs in students’ outputs by token.

 

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

the

nu

mb

er o

f tr

ansl

atio

ns

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47

Epistemic markers

the number of successful translation attempts the number of successful attempts w ith modal meaning transferred

Examples

• They should be given in italics, without quotation marks;

• The source of the example should be clearly indicated;

• They may be set off from the rest of the text if the analysis is based on them;

• If they are set off from the rest of the text, they should be numbered consecutively and referred to by these numbers in the text;

• If they are set off from the rest of the text, they are single-spaced;

• For the sake of space, they may be given in a smaller font (TNR 10).

All these examples fall within the category of deontic modality, which, as argued by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 81), “identifies the enabling or compelling circumstances external to the participant as some person(s), often the speaker, and/or as some social or ethical norm(s) permitting or obliging the participant to engage in the state of affairs.” 

(1) Then I will argue that this notion should cover a class of cases that Heim would probably not have included. (LP2003-2)

 (2) A theory of language should: (1) Be a theory of language and not of

something else, such as the mind or human behaviour. (LS2003-5)  

(3) Strictly speaking one should not think of speaker intentions as determining directly the set of target mental representations. (LP2005-6)

 Notably, the subjective/strong use of SHOULD was not attested in my corpus.

Other functions of italics

• In the text:– For examples;

– For titles of books and periodicals;

– For words or phrases imported from another language;

– For special emphasis.

• In references:– For titles of books and periodicals.

The publication and immediate success of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 opened a new era in the literary tastes of the English.

Freudian concept of das Unheimliche, the ‘uncanny’, which is “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud, 1990: 363—4), is in fact central to Kayser’s understanding of the grotesque.

A note on titles

• If given in the text (not in references, where a different rule may apply depending on the format used), they follow the spelling rules (in particular capitalisation) of their language.

Words and phrases from other languages

• In principle, a translation should be supplied in single quotation marks or square brackets immediately following the item.

First, a large number of nonce-formations are coined under the pressure of changing socio-cultural reality, e.g. Pl. eurofob ‘a person who views the prospective accession of Poland to the European Union with fear or hatred’ or lepperyzm ‘practices, behaviour or philosophy of or similar to that of…’ (coined from a proper name).

Thus more than half of the main clause occurrences of MUSIEĆ ‘must’ were classified as inferred evidentials (57%), the remaining 43% identified as proper evidentials (Ex. 11, 12, respectively) 

(11) Tego rodzaju nacechowaną diatezę sygnalizować mogą oczywiście wyłącznie tzw. czasowniki przechodnie, czyli takie, które dopuszczają możliwość ujawnienia przez podmiot drugiego argumentu reprezentowanego przez siebie predykatu. Czasowniki mogące sygnalizować tę diatezę reprezentować zatem muszą predykaty conajmniej dwuargumentowe. (BPTJ2001-6)

[This kind of marked diathesis can of course be signalled only by so called transitive verbs, that is verbs which allow the subject to disclose the second argument of the predicate they represent. Thus verbs which can signal this diathesis must be predicates with at least two arguments.]

 (12) Liczne skupisko nazw terenowych koło Szczecina (6 nazw) musiało pierwotnie

mieć związek z wcześniejszą nazwą miejscową lub rzeczną. (ON2003-4)[The big cluster of toponyms in the vicinity of Szczecin must originally have been connected with a former name of a place or a river]

 

A note on hyphenation

note-taking

first-level division

Almost half of the recorded examples of epistemic SHOULD were identified as evidentials – either inferred (35% of epistemic records, Ex. 15) or quotative (attributed, in 14% of epistemic cases, Fig. 5).

Quotation marks

• Are used to signal a direct quotation if it is incorporated in the text (in contrast to block quotations);

Later in the century, this view of the grotesque changed and once more emphasis was placed on “fantasy with a practical aspect — parody, burlesque, mockery, caricature” (Clayborough, 1965: 49).

• Are used around titles of shorter texts, like articles or poems;

• Are used to supply a translation of a foreign item;• Single quotation marks are normally used for quotes

within quotes and for marking elements as instances of mention rather than use.

‘Language’ has eight characters.

Citations

• Direct quotations– Follow exactly the quoted

source;

– Must fit in syntactically in the text;

– Are quoted with exact page reference;

– No intervention permitted apart from elipsis and (minor!) additions introduced in square brackets;

– If they are in another language, a translation should be supplied, e.g. in a footnote.

• Indirect quotations– They paraphrase the source;

– Page reference, although often recommended, is not obligatory;

– Permit a selective approach to the information in the source;

– Are unproblematic if the source is in another language – the paraphrase is always in English and no exact translation is required.

Direct quotations

• Incorporated in the text– Short, not longer than 100

words or 7 lines;

– Enclosed in double quotation marks;

– Closely following the source in punctuation except at the end of the quote, where commas and periods are always placed INSIDE the quote (all other marks must be placed outside unless they are truly part of the quote).

• Block quotations– Longer;

– Set off from the rest of the text as a separate paragraph;

– The paragraph is indented throughout from both margins;

– The font is smaller (TNR 10);

– No quotation marks are used.

Incorporated quotations

Freeman (1970: 4) observes that there are three basic approaches to the problem of style in the field of linguistic stylistics: “style as deviation from the norm, style as recurrence or convergence of textural pattern, and style as a particular exploitation of a grammar of possibilities.” The difficulty connected with the first style-as-deviation or style-as-difference approach is the status of the norm.

With elipsis:In their discussion of foregrounding, both Mukařovský and Leech

draw attention not only to the presence of elements which violate the norm, but also to their interdependencies. “The devices by which poetic language achieves its maximum of foregrounding must . . . be sought elsewhere than in the quantity of foregrounded components. They consist in the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding” (Mukařovský, 1970: 44).

Footnoting:Riffaterre understands the norm in terms of stylistic context. “The

stylistic context is a linguistic pattern suddenly broken by an element which was unpredictable, and the contrast resulting from this interference is the stylistic stimulus.”1

Block quotationsHowever, the English were more tolerant towards the grotesque

than the author of L’art poètique.

English taste for the grotesque revealed itself in opera, burlesque, farce, and essays produced during the neo-classical years. Their love of the Gothic was more submerged, but it was also there. In theory, classical taste prevailed, but in practice, the staunchest neo-classicists admired certain ‘Gothic’ writers even though they considered these Elizabethans ‘grotesque’ and ‘irregular’. (Barasch, 1971: 129)

Footnoting:

Kirk views the image of a human-animal hybrid in terms of the nature-culture polarisation, the Centaur being a fine example:

First of all the Centaurs themselves, in that they were half horse, symbolized both the wild aspect of nature (for horses are shaggy, swift, sometimes difficult to control, and obviously potent in a sexual sense) and its more benign side (for they are also friendly to men, impressive and dignified in appearance, contemplative in their glance and a mark of social standing). That is their horse-aspect; but they are half men as well, and so the coexistence of nature and culture becomes all the more striking.1

 

Indirect quotations

The author’s identity is, on the one hand, that of a member of the academic discourse community who shows respect for fellow scholars and the conventions accepted by the community (see, e.g., Myers, 1989; Swales, 1990; Hyland, 1994) and on the other, that of an individual researcher making a bid for recognition and acceptance of his/her claims (Koutsantoni, 2004; Martín-Martín and Burgess 2004).

Additions inside direct quotations

In an attempt to define verbal humour, Raskin (1985: 46) proposes that it encompasses “[any] text which is capable of creating a humorous effect,” to the exclusion of “a humorous situation which is not created, described and expressed by a text.” To clarify this point, the author continues: “[even] if a non-verbal humorous situation is accompanied by a text but the text is just a component of the joke rather than its creator, it is still non-verbal humour” (Raskin, 1985: 46).

References (Bibliography) and ‘hanging entries’

Abdel-Fattah, Mahmoud M. 2005. On the translation of modals from English into Arabic and vice versa: The case of deontic modality. Babel 51: 31-48.

 Bülow-Møller, Anne Marie. 1999. Existential problems: On the processing of irrealis in

simultaneous interpreting. Interpreting 4(2): 145-168  

Candlin, Christopher N., and Ken Hyland, eds. 1999. Writing: Texts, processes and practices. London: Longman.

 Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols, eds. 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of

epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.  

Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The semantics of modal auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. 

Dendale, Patrick, and Liliane Tasmowski. 2001. Introduction: Evidentiality and related notions. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 339-348.

 Englebretson, Robert, ed. 2007. Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation,

interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Thank you!