Unit 1 (Tips and Answers)

Unit 1

Check your understanding

1. Research paper writing is considered an enlightening activity for academia to access and update

research.

2. For one thing, a research paper is primarily presented to experts sharing one’s own research

interest. For another, a specific and clear purpose matters a lot for a decent research paper.

3. Three types: course papers, thesis papers and journal articles

4. Three macro-principles: honesty; relevance; clarity

5. Research papers are formal, objective, and cautious

In-class activities:

1. (1) The audience of the first passage is researchers who are interested in academic studying, but

the audience of the second passage is common people who are interested in novels.

The purpose of the first passage is to prove some phenomenon or controversial issues with

evidence. The purpose of the second passage is to express the writer’s subjective feelings or ideas.

(2) They need to have obvious opinion and have some evidence to prove their idea.

2. (1) The personal pronoun in the seven cases like “I” “my” “me” are to emphasize that it was the

author who did the researches or had the findings.

(2) The seven cases are rewritten as follows:

Case 1. After finishing the project, the author found that Information System (IS) techniques

can be applied to the real world. This helps the author to be an IS professional in the future career.

Case 2. In this section, the author is going to describe the findings from his interviews with the

students based on their experience of the lesson in which the author used task-based grammar

teaching approach.

Case 3. Likewise, the author has offered evidence that some critical thinking practices may

marginalize subcultural groups, such as women, within U.S. society itself.

Case 4. This is a worthy experience to the author especially in last year of my tertiary study.

The author hope the success of the fatigue test program will become an educational tool for the

student to know more about fatigue in the Mechanical laboratory.

Case 5. The author hope to identify some genus- and species-specific sequences for PCR primer

or DNA probe design for the detection of Salmonella spp.

Case 6. The author has interviewed 10 teachers from different primary and secondary schools in

Hong Kong.

Case 7. The author thinks it works something like this: suppose we start with a new,

just-assembled ship S. . .

3. The sentences are revised as following:

a. If the researcher is the principal investigator, he or she should place an asterisk after his name.

b. One should do the best he or she can.

c. After filling out his or her class schedule, the student should place it in the registrar’s basket.

d. When a student wishes to avoid sex bias in his writing, he or she should examine these

alternatives.

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4. (1) The informal wordings used in this passage are marked in italics in the passage as follows.

For our project we decided to check out the impact of two simple actions aimed at getting more

female employees to use the stairs at a five floor worksite. The 2 things we did were we put up a

health sign that linked stair use to health and fitness. (We put the sign at the junction between the

staircase and the life.) And the second thing was an email which we asked the worksite doctor to

send out. We asked him to point out how regular stair use could be really good for general fitness.

We did the research by checking things out in four stages: a baseline week, the week after the sign,

the week after the email and then 3 weeks after that. We were really pleased that stair use went up

a lot in the week after the sign, from a baseline of 89% to 93%, and then up again to 100% after

the email. Unfortunately, 4 weeks after the email was sent out, stair use had gone down to 67%

and we were very disappointed about that. We had expected these simple actions to lead to more

stair use but we didn’t think the positive effect would’ve vanished after a month.

(2) The informal wordings are classified as following:

Personal: our

Emotive: pleased; disappointed

Causal: 2; that

Contracted: didn’t; would’ve

5. (1) The passage is too subjective and the violations against the stylistic requirements of research

paper writing are marked in italics in the passage as follows:

On the basis of the internal structure of English words and their meanings, in my opinion, this

software aims to offer an effective tool on word-formation in English learning, teaching and

researching. Drawing on the basic idea of English word formation, by the engineering practical

query of sub-system and sub-module, I’m sure that it achieves the goal for the search of English

words, roots and affixes, ultimately, completely presented a set of English word-formation pictures

in the window of the users. Finally, if you demonstrate and investigate it on English learner, you

will find that English word-formation software should apply to him and it is better for him learning

word-formation and those engaging in teaching and studying English vocabulary. To some extent,

I firmly believe English word-formation software is helpful to bridge the gap of the lack of

national professional English applications.

(2) The following is a better version for the passage:

On the basis of the internal structure of English words and their meanings, this software aims to

offer an effective tool on word-formation in English learning, teaching and researching. Drawing

on the basic idea of English word formation, by the engineering practical query of sub-system and

sub-module, it achieves the goal for the search of English words, roots and affixes, ultimately,

completely presented a set of English word-formation pictures in the window of the users. Finally,

if the users demonstrate and investigate it on English learner, they will find that English

word-formation software should apply to them and it is better for them learning word-formation

and those engaging in teaching and studying English vocabulary. To some extent, English

word-formation software is helpful to bridge the gap of the lack of national professional English

applications.

Post-Class Tasks

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1. First, a research paper should be systematic so that the readers can understand the writer’s

opinion clearly.

Second, a research paper should be objective, for it is not persuasive enough if it is too

subjective.

Third, a research paper should not use expressions with sexist words in it, for it is offensive if

there is only he or she in the sentence.

2. The first passage belongs to non-research paper writing because it is subjective. The author has

used many pronouns like “I” or “us” which reveals its subjectivity.

The second passage falls into research paper writing because it is objective and systematic. The

author wouldn’t use pronouns that are subjective and would cite some words from other

researches to support his opinion.

3. The sentences are rewritten as follows:

a. It seems that the commitment to some of the social and pragmatic concepts was less strong than

it is now.

b. Weismann proved that animals become adaptive to the system of communication because, if

they did not, there could possible be no successive replacement of individuals and hence no

evolution.

c. Yet a generative linguist may not remain in isolation when confronted with Sapir-Whorf

Hypothesis.

d. Recent work on the phonology of Northern Ireland shows a possibly separating out of

consonants, with the explosive drifting westwards and vice versa.

e. By analogy, cognitive linguists can walk from one point to another by a path which is always

against generative counterpart, and maybe a consensus on the universals of language use should be

met between them.

f. There are cases where this would have been one of the possible method to crack poem

translation.

4．This is a passage which is both objective and cautious, for it uses passive sentences, hedges and

cites words from other researches to make the passage objective and cautious. The objective

expression is marked as follows.

Despite differing theoretical views within cognitive semantics there appears to be a consensus

on certain fundamental theoretical constructs: (i) the basic semantic unit is a mental concept; (ii)

concepts cannot be understood independent of the domain in which they are embedded; (iii)

conceptual structures represent a construal of experience, that is, an active mental operation; and

(iv) concept categories involve prototypes and are organized by (at least) taxonomic relations.

Although the basic constructs of “concept”, “domain”, “construal”, and “category structure” go by

different names, they are essentially the same among researchers in cognitive linguistics. We

examine a fifth theoretical construct, that of ``image schemas'' (recurring basic conceptual

structures), and argue that image schemas are a subtype of domain. We begin with the theory of

domains proposed by Langacker, which is similar to Fillmore's theory of frame semantics.

Langacker distinguishes two types of domains, locational and configurational; we argue that it is

concepts in domains that are locational or configurational, not the domains them-selves. We then

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analyze image schemas and show how they function like domains, in which are found both

locational and configurational concepts.

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