Differential Use of Reporting Verbs in Academic Papers and Personal Blogs

Abstract

Appropriate use of reporting verbs plays an important role in building arguments in academic writing. Many studies have investigated the use of reporting verbs in academic writing, but little attention has been paid to the comparison of reporting verb use in academic writing with more informal writing. To address this research gap, this study aims to compare the use of reporting verbs in academic writing and in blog writing. Two comparable academic and blog corpora were prepared: the academic corpus with 150 articles of 1,219,659 tokens and the blog corpus with 379 blogs of 1,573,764 tokens. The frequency ratios of reporting verbs and their functions, based on Thompson’s (1994) classification of reporting verbs, were examined. The blog corpus was found to have more reporting verbs by token frequency, but the normalized blog/academic ratio and academic/blog ratio indicates that many reporting verbs used in blog writing were not frequently used in academic writing. Furthermore, academic writers used reporting verbs to refer to the evidence of their claims while blog writers used them to describe the manner of speaking. The results of this study suggest that types and functions of reporting verb should be considered when integrating blog writing into academic writing.