Using authentic language data to teach discipline-specific writing patterns to STEM students

Abstract

Technical and scientific writing service courses offer instructors the opportunity to engage with student populations from across the university. However, it is also this interdisciplinary appeal that has complicated the quality of instruction, particularly for STEM majors. The heterogeneous student population in our service courses often results in generic instruction that contradicts how STEM practitioners communicate on the job. We offer corpus-linguistic approaches as a solution for teaching variation in writing classes. Engaging students with authentic language data helps them understand the patterns used in their discipline rather than reinforce general, and potentially prescriptive, writing principles. We focus our study on the presence of passive voice and reporting verbs in a corpus of student-written critical reviews and white papers. Our results indicated that students applied passive voice in both text types, contradicting the advice of most generalist technical writing textbooks. More importantly, students appeared to use passive voice with an intent, often as a way to stay on topic. Our results also demonstrated that students used a variety of reporting verbs, notably show, believe, and conclude. Overall, these findings suggest ways that technical and scientific writing instructors can integrate corpus research into their classrooms.