TY - JOUR
T1 - Examining novice writers’ perceptions of formality
AU - Larsson, Tove
AU - Kaatari, Henrik
AU - Dixon, Tülay
AU - Egbert, Jesse
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
PY - 2023/7/20
Y1 - 2023/7/20
N2 - Adherence to standards pertaining to formality remains important for novice academic writers wishing to write within the scientific community. However, due to its elusive nature, it may not be clear what “formal” really means. This study investigates what affects novice writers’ perceptions of formality; specifically, it looks at the individual and combined impact of register (journal articles vs. academic blog posts) and linguistic features with two variants (e.g., split vs. non-split infinitives). The writers (n=117) were presented with a series of binary choices between register-feature combinations and asked to select the most formal combination. This resulted in a rank-ordered list showing which combinations they perceived as more formal. The results showed that the novice writers’ perceptions largely aligned with the expected rankings, in that journal articles and the feature variant associated with this register tended to be perceived as more formal than the alternative. These trends were especially strong for two of the features investigated: exclamation points and contractions. In bringing us one step closer to understanding how novice writers think about formality, this study helps shed some light on the commonly used, but less commonly defined, concept of formality.
AB - Adherence to standards pertaining to formality remains important for novice academic writers wishing to write within the scientific community. However, due to its elusive nature, it may not be clear what “formal” really means. This study investigates what affects novice writers’ perceptions of formality; specifically, it looks at the individual and combined impact of register (journal articles vs. academic blog posts) and linguistic features with two variants (e.g., split vs. non-split infinitives). The writers (n=117) were presented with a series of binary choices between register-feature combinations and asked to select the most formal combination. This resulted in a rank-ordered list showing which combinations they perceived as more formal. The results showed that the novice writers’ perceptions largely aligned with the expected rankings, in that journal articles and the feature variant associated with this register tended to be perceived as more formal than the alternative. These trends were especially strong for two of the features investigated: exclamation points and contractions. In bringing us one step closer to understanding how novice writers think about formality, this study helps shed some light on the commonly used, but less commonly defined, concept of formality.
KW - formality
KW - linguistic features
KW - novice writers’ perceptions
KW - registers
KW - writing for the scientific community
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U2 - 10.1075/jerpp.22010.lar
DO - 10.1075/jerpp.22010.lar
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85169916352
SN - 2590-0994
VL - 4
SP - 29
EP - 55
JO - Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes
JF - Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes
IS - 1
ER -