Revision of scientific manuscripts by nonnative-English-speaking scientists in
response to journal editors’ criticism of the language
Karen Englander
Abstract
Scientists’ manuscripts must fulfil the expectations of journal reviewers and editors in order to be published, whether the author’s first language is English or not. However, manuscripts submitted by nonnative-English-speaking scientists are sometimes criti-cized for their language usage and they require revision. In some cases, these authors do revise their manuscripts, resubmit them, and have them accepted for publication. To date, little had been known about the linguistic changes scientists make to their manuscripts, nor had there been a close descriptive study of the textual revisions that served to satisfy the demands of journal editors. This study uses the systemic functional linguistics approach of discourse analysis to examine the changes made in a small corpus of manuscripts from nonnative-English-speaking scientists that were initially criticized, in part for their language usage, but were later accepted. The results demonstrate that the changes that were made at the lexicogrammatical level were not mere syntactic corrections, but altered the position of the scientist and his text in relation to the scientific community.
Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Facultad de Idiomas, Blvd. Zertuche y Blvd. Los Lagos, S/N, Col. Valle Dorado, Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, 22890
Much literature in the past two decades has sought to identify and explain how scientific articles are constructed. Studies have been undertaken using diverse methodological approaches, including, but by no means limited to, genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 2004), the sociology of scientific knowledge (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Bazerman, 1988; Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Knorr-Cetina, 1981) and, more recently, systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Martin, 1993; Martin and Veel, 1998; Martínez, 2001, 2003; Samraj, 2005).
While the theoretical and methodological approaches differ, they concur that ‘the language used to convey scientific knowledge is neither transparent nor self-evident’ (Englander, 2006: 37). Scientific writing serves to render ‘the logi-cal implications of statements more detectable and… make their implications both clear and true’ (Olson, 1977/1988: 183). To accomplish this goal, scientists must hone five distinct practices: establish the novelty of one’s position, make a suitable level of claim, acknowledge prior work, offer evidence of one’s view based on discipline- and community-specific arguments and procedures, and demonstrate disciplinary ethos and willingness to negotiate with peers (Hyland, 2000: 12). All scientific authors must demonstrate these practices, whether their first language (L1) is English or not.
Studies of journal editors indicate that the manuscripts submitted by nonnative-English speakers often require special attention (Flowerdew, 2000, 2001; Gosden, 1992, 2003; Martínez, 2003; McGinty, 1999). Editors state that sometimes there are problems with ‘the English’. They say that the English usage is awkward, problematic, and/or unclear. They may comment that there are ‘second-language mistakes that interfere with clarity and obscure meaning’ (Flowerdew, 2000: 136). Journal editors seem to readily distinguish, in their own minds, a dichotomy between native and nonnative usage of English.
Despite criticisms on the language usage in a submitted manuscript, some scientists who speak English as a second language (L2) are able to revise their articles, resubmit them, and have them accepted for publication. However, little is known about the linguistic changes such scientists make to their manuscripts. Neither has there been a close descriptive study of the textual revisions that serve to satisfy the demands of journal editors. Such data could make explicit the nature of revision required when language is identified as a problem in L2 scientific manuscripts.
To identify the problem qualities of such manuscripts, this study was undertaken to examine the changes made in manuscripts that were initially criticized and later accepted by journal editors. That is, a close analysis was made of what was altered in two versions of the same manuscript. Systemic
functional linguistics (SFL) was used as the theoretical lens, as it allows for a multi-layered analysis. It will be demonstrated that the changes that were made at the lexicogrammatical level were not mere syntactic corrections. The changes altered the positioning of the scientist and his text in order to accomplish the five scientific practices outlined by Hyland (2000) above that are required of a publishable manuscript.
The study
This study constitutes a collective case study (Stake, 1995) in that all the case studies share a common characteristic: they are all Mexican scientists who suc-cessfully published their article in English after initial rejection by that journal for reasons which included their language use. For example, the editor of the journal to which one participant submitted his manuscript wrote, ‘It is clear that the manuscript is currently not acceptable for publication’ as the ‘description was deemed inadequate, as was the evaluation of overall variation within [the species]’. The editor further noted, ‘We would be pleased to consider a revised manuscript. However, be sure to have the English checked before resubmission’. Each of the three participants in this study received similar critical comments that noted not only problems with the scientific content of the paper but the language itself. Thus, this is a study of successful revision, where success is defined as the text being accepted for publication.
Several typical cases were studied and two research questions were addressed:
(1) What are the lexicogrammatical changes that Spanish-speaking scientists make to their English manuscripts that are accepted for publication after initial rejection for reasons which include language use?
(2) What do these changes reflect about differences in the register and genre of the manuscripts?
Three scientists participated in this study; all were engaged in publishing their research which was conducted at one of two institutes of higher learning in the Mexican city of Ensenada. Two of the scientists are from the field of marine sciences and the third is a geophysicist. They are referred to by pseudonyms: Jesús, Roberto, and Victor.
While some recent genre and discourse analysis of scientific writing is spe-cialized by scientific field (Halliday and Martin, 1993; Prior, 1998), there still exists a ‘language of science’ (Halliday and Martin, 1993: 4) that is shared by all scientific disciplines. This language of science is ‘defined, and recognized, by certain syndromes, patterns of co-occurrence among features at one or another
linguistic level’ (Halliday and Martin, 1993: 4). Therefore a limitation of this study is that cross-discipline or intra-discipline analysis is not undertaken, but rather all texts are simply recognized as being scientific.
Method
Specific documents were collected from each participant: the originally sub-mitted manuscript, the revised submission, and the correspondence from the journal editor and/or reviewer that stated that there were problems with the language in the original submission. This latter may have been expressed as requiring the writer to ‘have the manuscript reviewed by a native speaker’ or, more simply, a directive to improve the language usage, indicating that it was not written to the standards of the journal editor.
For each case, I performed a preliminary reading of the scientist’s original submission to identify the salient section(s) for analysis. As scientific texts, these were largely structured in the conventional format of abstract, introduc-tion, methods, results, and discussion, with accompanying figures, where each is considered a section. The introduction section was identified as most salient for analysis as it is the section that differed the most drastically from the original submission to the revised submission. Introduction sections are frequently cited in the literature as the most difficult to write (Flowerdew, 1999).
The introduction sections of the original submission and the revised sub-mission written by the participants were subjected to a discourse analysis using systemic functional linguistics. To aid in data analysis, the Systemic Coder (O’Donnell, 2002) was downloaded from the site www.wagsoft.com and a coding scheme was developed for each of the metafunctions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The coding is justified on theoretically principled grounds, and was informed by the work of Ravelli (2000), Lock (1996), and Crismore and Farnsworth (1990). The salient features of idea-tion, instantiated as representation (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004: 59), were processes and participants, where processes were further identified as passive or active. The processes were identified as material, relational, mental, verbal, and existential (Lock, 1996; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004).
Participants were grouped into four categories: human, non-human, existen-tial and pronoun clause referent. The first two categories are relevant to Gosden’s (1993) cline of interactiveness, which identifies four domains of participants. At one end of the cline is the ‘participant domain’ which is comprised of research-ers other than the author and represents a ‘more external community-oriented theme’ (p. 63), and ‘the participant viewpoint’ or ‘discourse participant’ exem-plified by lexicon such as our argument and we in which there is a ‘more internal writer-oriented theme’. These participants are captured in my analysis in the cat-
egory of human participants and are subdivided into the researcher and other researchers. In Gosden’s analysis, and displaying decreasing interactiveness, are three additional domains: ‘discourse domain’ exemplified by participants such as this paper or previous studies; ‘hypothesized and objectivized domain’ exemplified by participants such as one factor, the model, and it was evident; and the ‘real world domain’ consisting of real world entities such as materials, events or processes such as annealing and mental processes such as deduc-tion. In this study, these three domains are largely collapsed into the category of non-human participants although the existential participant it is isolated because it is relevant to the existential processes instantiated in the texts. The non-human participants are instantiated by participants such as the effect of the amplitude and the magnetic transfer function. Less writer visibility and more topic-based themes are the consequences of these participant choices. In this study, a fourth participant category was used of ‘pronoun clause referent’ which does not appear in the Gosden taxonomy. This is instantiated by occurrences such as this requires where this refers to tackling harder geological problems with an increasing probability of success from the previous clause. Another example is seen in this completes the magnetotelluric response functions… where this refers to a need to find a full and consistent invariant description for the tipper from the previous clause.
The interpersonal metafunction was coded for the salient features of modals, attitude markers, hedging, emphatics, commentary, and attributor. These first three are based on the principal categories of Vande Kopple (1985, cited in Crismore and Fansworth, 1990): modality markers ‘assess certainty and uncertainty of propositional content and the degree of commitment to that assessment’; attitude markers are used to ‘reveal the author’s attitudes toward the propositional content’ and exemplified by terms such as surprisingly and it is fortunate that; and commentary which draws readers into an implicit dialogue with the author (p.123). Vande Kopple further subdivides the category of modality into hedges, emphatics, and attributors (according to Einstein). Hedges and emphatics are stance features that serve to soften or solidify the writer’s viewpoint (Hyland, 1999). The category of attributor is also identi-fied and is subdivided into parenthetical, as in, The work was motivated by a recent discussion in Geophysics (Esparza and Gómez-Treviño, 1977) where the attributors are named in parenthesis, versus present in the clause, such as the reference to Jupp and Vozoff in, We present an invariant for the tipper that overcomes the difficulties of the early definition of Jupp and Vozoff (1976). This distinction is pertinent as a feature of interpersonal meaning as it situates the writer’s relationship with the other authors differently: in the first case the cited author is used only as a reference; whereas, in the latter case the cited author is prominent within the clause.
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The textual metafunction was analyzed for three features. Marked and unmarked theme was identified for each clause. Sentence structure was also analyzed and viewed as salient based on the propensity for Spanish writers to use long, multi-clause sentences (Montaño-Harmon, 1991); therefore, the first occurring clause in a sentence was analyzed as principal and sole clause, or principal and not sole clause. Further the textual analysis was expanded to include the three moves that typically occur in introductions (Swales, 1990; Lewin, Fine and Young, 2001). Move 1 claims the relevance of the field under study. Move 2 establishes the gap that the present research is meant to fill. Move 3 previews the author’s new accomplishments by stating the purpose of the present study or the contents of the article. While Lewin, Fine and Young (2001) state that these move elements are ideational as part of a research narrative, my analysis treats them as textual. Each move is always realized lexicogrammatically with attendant ideational content, and it largely occurs in predictable, numerical order. Thus analysis of the moves in this context is not concerned with its ideational content, but the order of presentation. Since the textual metafunction is concerned with how a text is presented, the presence and ordering of moves can fulfil or violate the expectations of the genre.
Having created the coding scheme for each of the three systems within SFL, each scientist’s original submission was divided into clauses, and then coded three times to permit each of ideational, interpersonal, and textual coding. The process was then repeated using each scientist’s revised submission. The coding decisions relied on readings in the context and co-text in which the instance occurs. The result of the analyses is detailed in the next section. Extracts from the scientists’ texts are indicated by italics.
Basic descriptive statistics are used to report the data extracted by the Systemic Coder. The frequency of occurrences of a feature is identified as a percentage of the other features within that category. Where warranted, filtering for interre-lationships was applied as well. Statistical significance using the nonparametric tool of the chi-square and standard deviation are not reported because the corpus that was analyzed is quite limited, negating the utility of those additional measures. Net change from one version of the manuscript to the other is used as a guide for commenting on meaningful differences between the two versions.
As Eggins (1994) emphasizes, SFL is not intended as a prescriptive grammar, but as a descriptive one by making ‘statements and assessment not about good/bad, right/wrong, but about appropriacy or inappropriacy’ (Eggins, 1994: 140). The texts from each scientist were analyzed as cases of the sci-entific article, where the original submission was deemed inappropriate by the journal editor and the revised submission was deemed publishable and
therefore appropriate. The resulting description of the differences at the level of lexicogrammar metafunction of language, register, and genre led to answers to the research questions.
Results
Roberto, Jesús, and Victor each performed successful revisions to their manuscripts, which is evidenced by their final acceptance by the journals they targeted. To achieve this acceptance, substantial changes were made at the lexicogrammatical level to the manuscripts they had originally submitted. These original submissions were returned to the authors by the journal edi-tors for reasons that included awkward language use. Each scientist revised his manuscript, and in doing so, reconstrued the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings of the texts. The revised manuscripts were accepted for publication. The quantitative data concerning the three participants Roberto, Jesús and Victor are shown in Tables 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Table 4 shows a summary of the three scientists’ revisions. Below, a detailed description of this data is provided concerning Roberto’s manuscripts and excerpts are included. For the sake of brevity, the quantitative data are not as thoroughly discussed for Jesús and Victor although the data is included in the tables; in addition, relevant excerpts are included.
Roberto’s revisions
Roberto is a scientist in the field of geophysics at a research institute in Mexico. At this point in his career, he has published 12 articles and a book chapter in Spanish and three in English, although he reports that the manuscript stud-ied here is the first English one he personally wrote. The previous ones had been written by his research collaborators. The topic of the article concerns a mathematical calculation for the measurement of electromagnetic waves underneath the earth’s surface. His original manuscript was returned to him by the associate editor saying, ‘The paper needs some modifications before it can be accepted for publication… It would be a good idea that the authors have a native English-speaking geophysicist to improve (sic) the English usage in the paper’. One of the two reviewers wrote the words ‘unclear’ and ‘expression’ alongside some passages in the manuscript. This occurs twice in the introduc-tion section: once accompanying Roberto’s phrase day by day harder geological problems that appears in his opening sentence; and once in reference to an assertion about the description of the magnetic transfer function, which is crucial to his eventual claim.
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The introduction section of his initially submitted manuscript was comprised of 27 clauses (431 words) and his revised submitted manuscript comprised 38 clauses (610 words).
Table 1: Case study of Roberto
Scientist andMetafunction
Feature Original Submission(occurrences)
Revised Submission (occurrences)
PercentageInitial:Final
PercentageChange
ROBERTO
Ideation:Process Relational 6 in 27 clauses 8 in 38 clauses 22%:21% -1
Material 7 18 26:47 +21
Mental 4 5 15:13 -2
Verbal 1 3 4:8 +4
Existential 9 4 33:11 -22
Voice Passive 1 13 4:34 +30
Participant Human 1 1 4:3 -1
Non-human 12 31 44:81 +37
Pronoun Clause Referent 6 3 22:8 -14
Existential 8 3 30:8 -22
Interpersonal: Attitude Marker
9 3 31:8 -23
Hedging 3 13 11:34 +23
Emphatics 13 10 48:26 -22
Commentary 4 0 15:00 -15
Modals 4 7 15:18 +3
Attributor Present 5 7 18:18 0
Attributor Parenthetical
4 of 5 attributions
2 of 7 attributions 80:29 -51
Attributor Within Clause
1 of 5 attributions
5 of 7 attributions 20:71 +51
Textual: Marked Theme
9 of 17 sentences
10 of 28 sentences 53:36 -17
Principal and Sole Clause
2 of 17 sentences
11 of 28 sentences 12:39 +27
Principal but Not Sole Clause
6 of 17 sentences
7 of 28 sentences 35:25 -10
k. englander 137
Ideational changes are accomplished by marked changes in the two texts in the proportion of the processes, an increase in the passive voice, and changes in the participants. (See Roberto’s data in Table 1.) Proportionately, relational processes remain the same at 22% and 21% (6 of 27 occurrences in the original submission and 8 of 38 occurrences in the revised submission) and can be seen in such phrases as: the tensor function is a well known invariant and this completes the magnetotelluric response functions where ‘completes’ is a property of the mathematical calculation. Verbal processes remain small at 4% (1 occur-rence) and 8% (3 occurrences), respectively and are used in phrases such as: this paper presents an attempt and a number of techniques have been reported. Mental processes too remain similar at 15% (4 occurrences) in the original submission and 13% (5 occurrences) in the revised submission and are seen in phrases such as: a line of investigation received attention which is a thought process and thus analyzed as mental. Mental processes are also used in phrases where a calculation is resolved and something is learned. The substantial changes occur with the proportion of existential and material processes. Numerous existential processes are used in the original submission, for example:
It is undeniable that…
It is also true that…
It is only natural that…
There seems to be a high degree of asymmetry between…
More than half of these (that is, 5 of 9 occurrences) are eliminated in the revision.
Concerning processes, another phenomenon occurs in which the revision alters the process used. For example, Roberto recasts an idea that used a mate-rial process into a relational one. The first line of the introduction in the original submission states:
Present magnetotelluric instrumentation and interpretation tools allow us to tackle day by day harder geological problems…
The process allow is material as an ergative (Lock, 1996: 89). In contrast, the opening sentence of the revised submission states:
The aim of the magnetotelluric method of geophysical prospecting is to investigate the subsurface distribution of electrical resistivity…
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The process is is relational. New relational processes are added in the revised submission, describing the mathematical procedures involved in arriving at particular calculations, although the final proportion remains the same at just above 20%.
Material processes, which can be described simply as doing and happening (Lock, 1996), constitute a quarter of the processes in the original submission (7 of 27 occurrences or 26%) and are seen, for example, in two adjacent sentences:
An invariant of the magnetic transfer function would provide data with no intrinsic directional characteristic… just as it (sic) happens with the determinant… This feature would facilitate the unbiased inspection of large quantities of …data.
Interestingly, the proportion of material processes increases in the revised sub-mission, up to 47% (18 of 38 occurrences) and is seen in the verbs use, eliminate, and appear. The scientist writes of how his method uses measurements, that an effect is eliminated and that the magnetic field appears as a consequence of an action. One might speculate that the revised submission is a more active text because material processes indicate change and transformation, and in the original submission, there is only one occurrence of the passive:
The work was motivated by a recent Discussion in GEOPHYSICS…
However, Roberto’s 30% increase in use of the passive voice is closely linked to the material processes. Of the 18 occurrences of material processes in the revised submission, 61% of them are passive, as seen in:
Much information can be obtained by analyzing the elements of the tensor…The undesired dependence… is easily removed by use of a transfer function…The dependence of the tipper… can be eliminated by use of an invariant…
These material processes, obtain, remove and eliminate are activities, but they are used in the passive voice. Overall, the proportion of passive processes increases to a third of all the processes (32% or 13 of 38 occurrences).
Examining the participants in the texts, there are substantial differences in the two versions. The two texts both have only one occurrence of a human participant, although the identification of that participant differs. In the origi-nal submission, the human participant occurs in the clause, we must also take advantage of the important geometry constrains provided by the magnetic transfer function [note that ‘constraints’ is misspelled]. The we refers to the community of scientists concerned with the field of magnetotellurics. In the revised submission, the human participant occurs in the clause, In this paper we present an invariant for the tipper… Here we refers to the authors themselves. The percentage of non-
human participants rises dramatically from the original submission. In this first version, only 42% of the participants are non-human, i.e., the research subject (magnetic transfer function), other non-human phenomena, or the paper itself. In the revised submission, 81% of the participants are non-human.
Another striking feature of Roberto’s original submission is the particular lexicon he uses, which is eliminated in the revised submission. In the original submission, he draws from the realm of sentiment and fairness. For example, he writes of the impedance tensor receiving preferred attention, whereas the magnetic transfer function has been less fortunate. He writes that the field of magnetotellurics allows us – presumably, the community of scientists – to do things, and that the solution which he proposes is important because it is essen-tial to take advantage of present day instrumentation. These are concepts from the field of honor and justice, rather than scientific objectivity. Most striking is his statement of purpose for his scientific contribution. He states, This paper presents an attempt to make things even. This entire sentence disappears in the revised submission. His statement of purpose is rewritten as, In this paper we present an invariant for the tipper… The participant in the clause is the scientist, rather than the article, which is common in the ideational meaning of scientific texts. Further, the purpose is not to rectify an injustice, but merely to present a fact. This stabilizing of the field aspect of register is consistent with typical scientific articles which aim to present facts in an objective and measurable world.
Analysis of the interpersonal function in Roberto’s two texts demonstrates notable differences in virtually all the features. His use of attitude markers in which he comments on the propositional content (decrease of 23%) and commentary in which he invokes the reader within the text (decrease of 15%) are noticeably reduced in the revised submission. Commentary is evident in phrases such as:
Present… tools allow us to tackle day by day harder geological problems with an increasing probability of success.
As things are now, there seems to be a high degree of asymmetry between our knowledge of the impedance tensor and that of the magnetic transfer function.
Roberto’s use of allows us and our knowledge directly invokes the reader. As stated above, these sentences are wholly eliminated in the revised submission. An attitude marker is seen in the tensor determinant is a well known invariant. The adjective well known reveals both Roberto’s assumption about the content and, simultaneously credits his reader with particular knowledge. In the revised submission, the concept is rewritten as, The tensor determinant is commonly
140 Revision of scientific manuscripts
used… The revised version eliminates the reader’s state of knowledge and invokes only common practice.
Hedges and emphatics serve to weaken or strengthen a statement. By weak-ening a statement, less negotiation of the statement is possible on the part of the reader and strengthening a statement increases the likelihood of such negotiation. Roberto both increases hedging and decreases emphatics, thus in both cases he is lessening the negotiability of the propositional content of his text within the interpersonal metafunction. Hedges increase from 11% to 34% (from 3 of 27 occurrences to 13 of 38 occurrences) and can be seen in the inclusion of hedges in the revised submission phrases such as, This is usually done prior to …, the magnetic transfer function is usually referred to as tipper, a number of techniques, and several contributions. On the other hand, emphatics decrease 22% in the revised submission (from 13 of 27 occurrences to 10 of 38 occurrences). Emphatics present in the original submission which are eliminated in the revision include: there seems to be a high degree of asymmetry, the tensor determinant is a well known invariant, this feature would facilitate the unbiased inspection, it is essential to take full advantage.
In analyzing the textual metafunction of the two texts the changes from the original submission to the revised submission are seen principally in the presence of marked themes and complex sentence structures. The first clause element is marked in more than half of the sentences in the original submission (9 of 17 sentences, or 53%), and this percentage drops to about a third (10 of 28 sentences, 36%) in the revised submission. In coding the two texts, the introductory elements such as it was clear that were coded as marked elements, and they are largely removed in the revised submission. Where marked themes are used in the revised submission, they are phrases or words, such as, in general, traditionally, under normal conditions. The other noticeable change is that the sentence structure in the revised submission is grammatically simpler. Simple sentences with a single subject and verb comprise only 2 occurrences or 12% in the original submission, and this rises to 11 occurrences or 39% in the revised submission. Sentences in the original submission more frequently contain subordinate clauses, even two subordinate clauses, and additional phrases or groups, as in:
Along with the resistivity information contained in the impedance tensor, it is undeniable that we must also take advantage of the important geometry constraints provided by the magnetic transfer function.
These ideas are recast in the revised submission with two sentences: one simple and one straightforward complex:
k. englander 141
The dependence on the coordinate system can be eliminated using invariants with respect to rotation of the impedance tensor. Invariant quantities are important because they depend only on the resistivity distribution.
The move structure of the two texts is also noticeably different, resulting in a more common sequence in the revised submission. Roberto’s original submis-sion unfolds as follows:
Sentence 1 – Move 1 (Present magnetotelluric instrumentation … allow[s] us to tackle … harder geological problems)
Sentence 6 – Move 2 (There seems to be a high degree of asymmetry between our knowledge of the impedance tense and that of the magnetic transfer func-tion)
Sentence 8 – Move 3 (This paper presents an attempt to make things even.)
Sentence 13 – Move 2 (It became apparent that there was no invariant of the magnetic transfer function)
Sentence 16 – Move 1 (This feature would facilitate the unbiased inspection of large quantities of three-dimensional data.)
Sentence 17 – Move 2 (There is a need to find a full and consistent invariant description for the tipper)
The move structure in this text clearly violates the expected structure of an introduction in a scientific text. The gap that this work is intending to fill is stated three different times and is situated in the early, middle and final sections of the text. Having stated what the present study does (Move 3, sentence 8), Roberto reiterates the case for the work by repeating Move 1 and Move 2. Move 3 appears in the middle of the text.
In contrast, the revised submission is more consistent with expected moves of an introduction. It is structured as follows.
Sentence 9 – Move 1 (Invariant quantities are important because…)
Sentence 24 – Move 3 (In this paper we present an invariant for the tipper that overcomes the difficulties of the early definition)
Sentence 28 – Move 2 (It became apparent that there was no invariant of the magnetic transfer function)
While this structure still violates the sequence of the moves, it is uncluttered by repeated expressions of the moves, and where they do appear, they are clearly indicated.
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Jesús’ revisions
Jesús just completed his PhD at a research institute, specializing in oceanogra-phy. His article reports on a new species of shark found in the Sea of Cortez and this was the topic of his dissertation as well. Prior to publishing this article, he had been a co-author on another article published in English and had presented his work in Spanish at several conferences.
The introduction of the original submission comprised 24 clauses or 393 words. The introduction of the revised submission comprised 19 clauses or 279 words, making the revised submission about 25% percent shorter than the original submission. The distribution of the process features shows little change in the mental processes: 7 of 24 occurrences in the original submission versus 5 of 19 occurrences in the revised submission (see Table 2 for a summary of Jesús’ data). The proportion of verbal processes is reduced from 25% to 11% and is accomplished by eliminating several clauses that appear at the beginning of the text: a new smooth-hound shark… is described and M. hacat is described from 44 specimens. Material processes are reduced from 17% to 11% through the reduction of two occurrences. For instance, an entire clause possessing a material process was eliminated (underlining for emphasis added), as in the smooth-hound sharks are targeting (sic: targeted) by artisanal small boats. In contrast, relational processes almost doubled proportionately from 25% to 47%, including a case where the sentence structure was altered to add a new relational process. For example (the double lines indicate a clause break):
|| According with Campagno (1984) the key for these species provided in his work based on the revision of the genus Mustelus of the world should be used with extreme caution ||
In the first clause, used is the process, and it is a material process. This concept is rewritten in the revised submission as:
|| The key for these species provided in Compagno (1984) was based on the revision of the genus Mustelus of the world carried out by Heemstra (unpubl.) ||
|| and according to Compagno (1984) should be used with extreme caution ||
In this version, a group is expanded into a clause so that the process based on is added as a relational process.
The proportion of active and passive processes is altered, increasing the presence of active processes. Of the 24 clauses in the original submission, half the processes are active and half are passive (12 of 24 occurrences in each case). In contrast, two thirds of the processes in the revised submission are active (68% or 13 occurrences) and one third are passive (32% or 6 occurrences). This
k. englander 143
is accomplished by the total elimination of several clauses that were written in the passive, such as M. hacat is distinguished …by its color pattern. Distribution of passive with particular processes is changed as well. For example, in the original submission, the clause that reads in part where are distributed four recognized species is passive and material. Although Jesús incorrectly placed the grammatical subject after the verb, nonetheless, simple transposition to where
Table 2: Case study of Jesús.
Scientist andMetafunction
Feature Original Submission(occurrences)
Revised Submission (occurrences)
PercentageInitial:Final
PercentageChange
JESÚS
Ideation:Process Relational 6 in 24 clauses 9 in 19 clauses 25%:47% +22%
Material 4 2 17:11 -6
Mental 7 5 29:26 -3
Verbal 6 2 25:11 -14
Existential 1 1 4:5 +1
Voice Passives 12 6 50:32 -18
Participant Human 3 2 13:11 -2
Non-human 20 16 83:84 +1
Pronoun Clause Referent 0 0 0:0 0
Existential 1 1 4:5 +1
Interpersonal: Attitude Marker
0 1 0:6 +6
Hedging 13 12 54:63 +9
Emphatics 7 5 29:26 -3
Commentary 1 0 4:0 -4
Modals 2 2 8:11 +3
Attributor Present 8 11 33:58 +25
Attributor Parenthetical
6 of 8 attributions
5 of 11 attributions 75:45 -30
Attributor Within Clause 2 of 8
attributions6 of 11 attributions 25:55 +30
Textual: Marked Theme
7 of 14 sentences
4 of 9 sentences 50:44 -11
Principal and Sole Clause
3 of 14 sentences
1 of 9 sentences 21:16 -5
Principal but Not Sole Clause
4 of 14 sentences
4 of 9 sentences 29:44
+15
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four recognized species are distributed would correct the problem. However, this phrase in the revised submission is reconstructed to read, at least four species are recognized, which is passive and a mental process. In the revised submission, two thirds of all the passive processes are mental: is resolved, is distinguished, is known, is recognized, while in the original submission, slightly less than half of these mental processes are stated in the passive. Analysis of the participants in this text showed virtually no change proportionately, as seen in Table 2.
Analysis of interpersonal meaning shows the greatest changes in the features of hedging and attribution. In the original submission, just over half the clauses have hedging (54%), whereas in the revised submission, the figure rises to more than 60%. Hedges soften the definitive aspect of several statements. For example, the author speaks of taxonomic confusion in the Mexican Pacific where at least four species are recognized. The hedge at least does not appear in the original submission. Similarly, the author hedges the location where sharks are caught by saying, in some areas of the Gulf of California. In the original submission, the statement simply states that sharks are caught in the Gulf of California. Attribution increases 25% to become present in 58% of the clauses in the revised submission, whereas other researchers were referenced in only a third of the clauses in the original submission.
In the textual analysis, the changes to the text are minimal. Where they do occur, the number of subordinate and phrasal elements is reduced, as is the markedness of the clauses. Elimination of several opening sentences in the original submission accounts for both the decrease in simple sentences (i.e. principal and sole clause) and the decrease of marked themes. For example, both these sentences are eliminated: Three species had been recognized in this region (principal and sole clause feature) and Among the smooth-hound sharks in the area, M. hacat is distinguished from each other mainly by its color pattern… (marked theme feature).
Textually, Jesús’ revision markedly reorders the move structure of his intro-duction. In the original submission, the move structure can be described as Move 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, then 3, thus violating the expected sequential order and repeating the moves two and three times. The original submission proceeds with the following structure:
Sentence 1 – Move 3 (A new smooth-hound shark … is described.)
Sentence 2 – Move 1 (Three species has been previously recognized…)
Sentence 5 – Move 2 (Because these special have long been confused)
Sentence 5 – Move 3 (We present a key to species…)
k. englander 145
Sentence 9 – Move 1 (Members of this genus are difficult to separate…)
Sentence 11 – Move 2 (At date, the taxonomic confusion… has not been adequately resolved…)
Sentence 13 – Move 2 (However, because they have never been adequately differentiated…)
Sentence 14 – Move 3 (Here we describe a new species and provide a key…)
In contrast, the revised submission is structured in the following manner.
Sentence 4 – Move 1 (Members of this genus are difficult to separate…)
Sentence 6 – Move 2 (Currently, the taxonomic confusion… has not been adequately resolved…)
Sentence 9 – Move 3 (Here we describe a new species and provide a key…)
The revised submission is structured sequentially. It fulfils the expected textual metafunction whereby the moves of the introduction are presented 1, 2, 3, and only one time within the text.
Victor’s revisions
Victor is a well-established scientist in the field of marine biology with more than 20 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, all written in English. He has served as head of his department at a public university in Mexico. This article was severely criticized by one journal reviewer who wrote, ‘As English is not the author’s native language, there are also many grammatical errors and other textual deficiencies. These inadequacies should have been addressed prior to submission of the manuscript for review. Significant rewriting to address textual and technical deficiencies identified below is needed before I would endorse publication’. In the introduction section of Victor’s manuscript, that reviewer specifically commented that the second paragraph is ‘poorly written and needs modification’. The reviewer’s other comments concerned technical description of the phenomenon. Victor’s manuscript describes the presence and detection of a virus in the shrimp farms in Mexico that had never before been documented in North American shrimp stock.
The original submission has 29 clauses (655 words) while the revised submis-sion has 52 (1,063 words), indicating a substantially longer introduction in the accepted version. In creating ideational meaning (Table 3) the distribution of the processes remained remarkably stable with no changes of more than 6%, despite the 44% increase in the length of the text. The passive voice is used largely with material processes in the original submission: achieve, design,
146 Revision of scientific manuscripts
survey and test. In fact, one third of all the material processes are put in the passive. Victor writes that production is achieved, tools have been designed, farms were surveyed, and infectivity was tested. The only processes that are passive and not material are the verbal processes show and stress: it has been shown that [the virus] can infect farmed shrimp, and, a fact is stressed by a group of scientists.
Table 3: Case study of Victor
Scientist andMetafunction
Feature Original Submission(occurrences)
Revised Submission (occurrences)
PercentageInitial:Final
PercentageChange
VICTOR
Ideation:Process Relational 6 in 29 clauses 14 in 52 clauses 21%:27% +6%
Material 18 31 62:56 -6
Mental 0 1 0:2 +2
Verbal 1 3 3:6 +3
Existential 4 5 14:9 -5
Voice Passive 6 12 21:23 +2
Participant Human 4 13 14:25 +11
Non-human 20 33 69:63 -6
Pronoun Clause Referent 1 1 3:2 -1
Existential 4 5 -4
Interpersonal: Attitude Marker 5 8 17:15 -2
Hedging 2 6 7:12 +5
Emphatics 14 16 48:30 -18
Commentary 1 1 3:2 -1
Modals 1 5 3:10 +7
Attributor Present 15 31 52:60 +8
Attributor Parenthetical
7 of 15 attributions
19 of 31 attributions 47:61 +14
Attributor Within Clause 8 of 15
attributions12 of 31 attributions 53:40 -13
Textual: Marked Theme
12 of 19 sentences
14 of 23 sentences 63:61 -2
Principal and Sole Clause
2 of 19 sentences
9 of 23 sentences 11:39 +28
Principal but Not Sole Clause
5 of 19 sentences
9 of 23 sentences 36:39 +13
k. englander 147
In the revised submission, again, the vast majority of the processes presented in the passive are material ones; however, the verbal process question and the relational process is based on also appear in the passive. The participant distribution remains fairly stable across the two versions. The only noticeable difference occurs between the types of human participant in the two versions. In the initial version, the author never occurs as a participant, whereas the author does act as the participant five times in the final version. In the original submission, 100% of the human authors were other than Victor and his col-leagues. The effect of the positioning of the scientist himself can be seen most clearly in the final sentences of the introduction. The original submission ends by saying:
… in this study several randomly chosen shrimp farms from the Mexican Pacific Coast were surveyed and the presence of YVH demonstrated. In addition, its infectivity was tested…
In contrast, the revised submission concludes:
… during a field trip… we detected, for the first time in Mexico, the yellow head virus (YHV). In our laboratory, we reproduced the disease… and, finally, we extended the molecular tools to other genome regions…
The presence of the researchers is clear and overt in the revised submission; whereas, their role is backgrounded in the original submission through the use of passive processes with no stated agent.
Analysis of interpersonal meaning shows the greatest changes in the features of attribution and emphatics. Attribution is particularly interesting in Victor’s texts. Attribution positions the writer’s work in relation to other authors, and emphasizes or de-emphasizes the role of other authors. In Victor’s original submission, half of the clauses have attribution (15 of 29 occurrences, or 52%), while in the revised submission, 60% of the clauses have attribution (31 of 52 occurrences). There is a noticeable increase in the role of other authors in the revised submission. Attribution can be present within the clause in a number of ways: as participant, as a phrase in the form of ‘according to x’, or as the agent in a passive construction such as ‘a finding was reported by x’. In the original submission, 53% (8 of 15 occurrences) of the attributions are presented within the clause. However, in the revised submission, this positioning of attributors is reduced to 40% (12 of 31 occurrences). The alternate technique of attribution is placing the attributor in a parenthesis at the end of a clause, such as …while enveloped viruses such as WSSV and YHV were found not viable under the same treatment (Vanpatten, Nunan and Lightner 2004). This is present 47% (7 of 15 occurrences) in the original submission, but 61% (19 of 31 occurrences) in the
148 Revision of scientific manuscripts
revised submission. Thus Victor has given a greater role to the research of others by referring more often to the contributions of others, but he has simultaneously downplayed their role by placing them in a parenthetical citation rather than as actors in the text.
Textually, the revised submission is less syntactically complex than the original submission. Victor’s revised submission is 44% longer than the original submission, and the greatest increase structurally is the inclusion of principal and sole clauses. The original submission has only two sentences that con-sist of only the principal clause with no subsequent elements and no marked theme, comprising only 11% of the entire text (2 sentences of the 19). The revised submission has 9 such clauses of the 23 sentences, an increase of 28% proportionately. Similarly, the number of clauses with a marked theme drops slightly in the revised submission. The Spanish propensity for introductory phrases that become marked themes, and multiple subordinating phrases and groups (Montaño-Harmon, 1991; Santos Garcia, 2001) bears strong similarity to Victor’s construction of the original submission. His revised submission is much less syntactically complicated.
The move structure, a feature of textual meaning, is also made more clear and sequential in the revised submission. His original submission displays several distinct shortcomings as excerpted here.
[move 1] Then, there is no doubt that viral outbreaks are among the most concerning problems seeking for a trustable and profitable economic activ-ity. [move 2] At the recent past, there was not a means of prevention for the sudden arrival of viral infectious agents. At present, many molecular tools have been designed and are available to detect their presence. Some characteristics… make them highly adequate weapons to prevent fatal outbreaks. [move 3]Taking advantage of then, in this study several randomly chosen shrimp farms from the Mexican Pacific Coast were surveyed and the presence of YVH demonstrated. In addition, its infectivity was tested by means of infectivity assays, which revealed the relative lower virulence of the isolated strain when compared with others reported in the literature.
Victor actually makes a strong case in Move 1, where authors report what is known about the phenomenon under study; unfortunately, the sentence which highlights the relevance of the field (excerpted above) is poorly writ-ten. Move 2, whose purpose is to establish the gap in the research, actually misrepresents the gap. His study concerns detection and not prevention, which is what his statement indicates. Move 3, in which the authors should demonstrate their contribution, is written in passive form. This serves to background the authors in the particular place where they should be most prominent. Further, a crucial contribution of Victor’s paper is that a particular
virus was detected in Mexico for the first time, but this fact is written as a condensed clause in the second half of the sentence which focuses primarily on method rather than finding. The final statement of the introduction uses the pronoun its in the subject position; however the referent, the YHV virus, is somewhat difficult to determine in the previous sentence. These difficulties are overcome in the revised submission.
Discussion
In this study, a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) approach has been applied to the analysis of texts. Specifically it has been used as a method to examine the phenomenon of revision, such that two versions of the same text are com-pared and analyzed. This case study of revisions to the introduction sections of three Spanish-speaking scientists’ manuscripts attempts to theorize the nature of the changes required in order to ameliorate journal reviewers’ criti-cism of the language of the original manuscripts. In each case, the original version of the manuscript was analyzed for its ideational, interpersonal and textual features and then compared to an identical analysis of the manuscript that was accepted by the journal for publication. Statistical significance of changes to the texts were not extractable because of the small corpus, but the quantitative method of accounting for changes in features combined with qualitative interpretation allows this researcher to offer the following discussion of findings.
Previous studies have noted that journal editors may be dissatisfied with second language texts that would be quite acceptable in the writer’s L1. Conventions of writing successfully in a scientist’s L1 do not necessarily translate well in English when attempting to fulfil the rhetorical demands of the genre (Ventola and Mauranen, 1991; Kourilová, 1996; Wood, 1997). For Spanish speakers, qualities that characterize good writing in their L1 are shown to be different than those qualities valued in English (St. John, 1987; Montaño-Harmon, 1991; Fernández Polo, 1999; Simpson, 2000; Santos Garcia, 2001). The original submission written by Victor uses ‘flowery and elaborate’ language (St. John, 1987) as seen in his phrases: aquaculture [has] grown from a scarce 551 t in 1988 to 28,992 t in 1999; farmers have had to deal with huge mortalities; the successful and prompt development of the shrimp culture. His word choices convey the importance and urgency of his work but undermine the objectivity typical of English scientific prose. The scientist Roberto also employed a lexicon of sentiment and justice when describing his work as trying to make things even because an alternate method has received preferred attention and his focus has been less fortunate in this respect. Such a writing style could be quite acceptable in Spanish.
Spanish academic texts are less linear and less deductive than English texts (St. John, 1987). The preferred deductive logic is seen in the first few sentences of Roberto’s revised submission which read:
The aim of the magnetotelluric (MT) method of geophysical prospecting is… The method uses surface measurements… The raw measurements depend on the amplitude and direction of the incident fields… The effect of the amplitude and direction of the incident fields are eliminated by…
This text is very different from his original submission:
Present magnetotelluric instrumentation and interpretation tools allow us to tackle day by day harder geological problems with an increasing probability of success. This requires, however, to make (sic) an optimum and more comprehensive use of all the available response functions. Along with the resistivity information contained in the impedance tensor, it is undeniable that we must also take advantage of the important geometry constrains (sic) provided by the magnetic transfer function.
The original submission lacks the relational processes and simple progression of given and new information that is seen in the revised submission and it brings the reader directly into the text.
In other cases, original sentences were quite complex, as seen in Jesús’ original submission statement:
According with Compagno (1984), the key for these species provided in his work, based on the revision of the genus Mustelus of the world carried out by Heemstra (‘unpubl.’), should be used with extreme caution, because not every individual of a given species may fit the criteria given.
The rewritten version for the revised submission breaks into two coordinating clauses, instead of one complex sentence with embedding. This then is a more simple sentence structure.
Another manifestation of the linear structure of ideas that is typical of English academic prose is seen in the common 1, 2, 3 move structure in scientific article introductions (Swales, 1990). Both Jesús and Victor rewrite their text to the 1, 2, 3 move structure. Roberto rewrites his initial 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2 presentation of moves to the more linear 1, 3, 2 order.
Martín-Martín and Burgess (2004), although investigating academic criticism in abstracts, found that in comparing Spanish and English language articles, Spanish writers allow a relatively higher degree of acceptable interpersonal interaction in their texts. In the interpersonal meaning of the texts, the reader is invoked quite frequently in the texts of Roberto and Victor. The reader is included in the community of geophysicists where Roberto writes that the
present-day tools allow us to tackle problems and that we must also take advan-tage of particular knowledge. Victor uses commentary such as there is no doubt that, and Roberto states it is undeniable that; both these phrases allow the reader to interact with the text, and even doubt the text.
It is interesting to note that Jesús’ texts displayed few of the interpersonal features in his revision that are prominent in Roberto’s and Victor’s articles. Instead, Jesús’ added hedges in the revised submission to previously unhedged statements: four recognized species is revised to state at least four species, and in the Gulf of California is revised as in some areas of the Gulf of California. Hedging mitigates the force of a claim and minimizes possible criticism from peers (Myers, 1989).
The first research question of this study is: (1) What are the lexicogrammatical changes that Spanish-speaking L1 scientists make to their English scientific manuscripts that are accepted for publication after initial rejection for reasons which include language use? The lexicogrammatical structure of the initial texts written by the Spanish-speaking scientists in this study displays characteristics of ‘good’ Spanish scholarly writing. However, those features do not serve well in the L2 writing task. In revision, the interpersonal meaning was altered to create texts that allowed for less interaction on the part of the reader, and thus minimized the negotiability of the text (Halliday and Martin, 1993). In textual meaning, the texts were revised to be more linear and deductive, and ideation-ally, the revisions were less flowery and elaborate.
Additionally, other important revisions were made to the lexicogrammar of the text. This is seen principally in the distribution of participants, processes and voice. Halliday and Martin (1993) demonstrate how the system of processes in scientific writing creates authoritativeness in the text. Relational processes serve to create an edifice of things that simply exist. In these case studies, the use of relational processes typically increased, apart from Roberto. Similarly, the proportion of material processes, which indicates action, decreases. Roberto’s increase in use of material processes is mitigated by placing them in the pas-sive voice in the revised submission, and this makes actions on the part of the researcher backgrounded or invisible. Mental processes, too, were often passivized. Mental processes require a human actor, but putting a mental process in the passive voice removes the foregrounding of people and further minimizes the role of scientists in the text. The presence of relational processes and the passive voice are both typical of English scientific texts, as they serve to obviate the role of the scientist and hold noun phrases in relation to each other, construing phenomena as if they were things and holding reality still (Halliday and Martin, 1993). As a participant, the scientist only occupies that functional position in the statement of contribution of his scientific work, as seen in statements such as:
In this paper we present an invariant for the tipper, and In our laboratory, we reproduced the disease by means of… and, finally, we extended the molecular tools…
Finally, other researchers have an increased presence in the text, especially in Jesús’ and Victor’s work, although these other researchers in the community of scientists may be mentioned parenthetically as citations and not as the participants in a clause.
In response to the first research question, a summary of the lexicogrammati-cal changes in each scientist’s revised submission is presented in Table 4, which shows the increase, decrease, and change in lexicogrammatical features.
Table 4: Metafunctional changes to the published texts of three nonnative-English-speaking scientists
Case study of Scientist
Roberto Jesús Victor
Ideationalchangesto the revised submission
+ passive voice- relational processes+ material processes in passive voice- mental processes with scientist participants- existential processes+ non-human participants∆ lexicon field from justice and sentiment to fact and event
- passive voice+ relational processes+ material processes in passive voice+ mental processes in passive voice- material processes
+ passive voice+ relational processes+ material processes in passive voice+ mental processes- existential processes+ author as participant clause announcing own findings
Noticeably, the changes made by the three scientists differed from each other. Ideationally, passives tended to increase except in Jesús’ case where they decrease because four sentences in the original submission are eliminated in the revised submission. Interpersonally, attributions play an important role in relationships within the community of science since they place the current research in the context of the work done by others. The three scientists tended to either increase or not change the amount of attributions in their texts. Roberto and Jesús gave more prominence to other researchers by placing more of the attributions as named participants in the clause whereas Victor increased the number of attributions overall but placed more of them parenthetically rather than as named participants in clauses. In another example, Roberto’s use of commentary decreased by a third, whereas Jesús used no commentary in either version of his manuscript. Commentary, which is used to draw readers into a dialogue with the text, is not useful in the accepted version of the scientific manuscripts.
Yet many common changes can be seen across the three cases, especially in interpersonal and textual metafunctions: a decrease in attitude markers and emphatics, an increase in hedging, and a close approximation of the 1, 2, 3 move structure in the introductions. These changes are more profound than mere linguistic accuracy. Incorrect subject-verb agreement, convoluted word order, and unusual lexical usage are typically not the sole source of the changes although some examples of this are seen in the previous section.
What seems clear from the current study is that the alterations in the lexi-cogrammar and thus the metafunctions of language in the scientists’ revisions are significant. They relate to the presentation of the rationale of why the scientific work was undertaken (evidenced in the move structure), references to the larger body of literature (evidenced in attributions), and the contribu-tion of the particular research (evidenced in lessening emphatics, increasing hedging, and appropriately placing the researchers as participants in their studies). Such changes ‘reflect the social construction and negotiation of the originality and value of authors’ research, as well as reflecting the appropriate rhetorical expression demanded in convincing readers of that value’ (Gosden, 2003: 96, my emphasis). In order for Mexican scientists to successfully publish their manuscripts in English-language journals, they altered the metafunc-tions of language to be consistent with the configurations that are typical of English-language scientific texts. After all, they had been told that their original submissions were not accepted for publication in part because of the language use, and the revised version was accepted.
The second question in this study is: What do these changes reflect about differences in the register and genre of the manuscripts? In SFL, there is a
154 Revision of scientific manuscripts
consistent relationship between the metafunctions of language and register, and ‘one can infer the values of the [register] variables from the language of the text’ (Christie and Unsworth, 2000: 6) As a discourse analyst, I have been examining the text by looking closely at the lexicogrammatical changes that occurred in the two versions of each scientist’s manuscript. Because of the metaredundancy of language in the SFL approach to making meaning, changes at the level of metafunction may be reflecting changes at the level of register, and those register changes may be reflecting changes at the level of genre. These transformations are discussed below.
Lewin, Fine and Young’s (2001) study of scholarly texts is used here to char-acterize the expected register of scientific texts and explain the revisions made by the L2 scientists in this study. The category ‘field’ accounts for the institu-tionalized forum for exchange of ideas among scholars. It includes purposes such as sharing one’s discovery with peers, making a claim to a new theory or discovery thereby justifying social rewards, and providing background information. The field of the scientists’ manuscripts in this study changed to become more stationary and more fixed, consistent with the institutionalized form. The removal of the scientist as a participant in the clause altered the role of the scientist from an instigator of the research, to a position where he is no longer one who affects the work. Linguistically, there are more relational processes, and more of the material processes are passivized. The discovery is treated as pre-existing, and the scientific contribution presents something not recognized before. Even the lexicon conformed to the conventions of their particular fields. For example, Jesús’ was corrected for naming the species the Smooth-hound Shark, rather than smoothhound shark; Victor was told to spell out the acronyms for the viruses he named; and Roberto removed the vocabulary that was charged with evaluative terms and replaced it with much more neutral and ‘scientific’ terminology. In addition, in Victor’s case, he more appropriately made his claim by taking credit for the work of his research team by using the pronoun we in his statement of contribution, rather than putting the statement in the passive voice. This is the one place where the scientist needs to be present. On the other hand, other register features of field were always present and were not noticeably altered: sharing one’s discovery with peers, making a claim, providing background information for specialists and addressing the realm of scientific ideas.
Tenor accounts for the relationships between authors and readers. According to Lewin, Fine and Young (2001), the author ought to address readers as peers, not be personally familiar with them, and apply maximal social distance. Social norms require objectivity, modesty, and credit to one’s colleagues. The writer’s involvement seems to vary in the different rhetorical sections of the research article from neutral to fully participatory. Tenor was altered to conform to
k. englander 155
these expectations in the revisions made by the scientists in this study. Roberto initially included the reader among the community of scientists by using we and us, but such an imposition upon the reader is not appropriate. While the author is expected to address the readers as peers, they are not to be addressed directly. Further, the norm of objectivity is not obeyed when there is excessive use of introductory phrases such as it is clear that or there is no doubt that. These phrases are persuasive and not objective, and so allow the reader to question the objectivity of the clause that follows. The negotiability of the text is minimized. The number of references that are cited in the revised texts noticeably increased. This enhances the authors’ ability to credit their peers. Yet, as with field, there are other features of tenor that were always present. The authors address a specialized audience with whom they share a background of ideas, facts and approach to scientific endeavors: an audience of a specialized, educated stratum of society.
Mode accounts for the choices between spoken and written discourse. In the case of the journal article, according to Lewin, Fine and Young (2001: 9–10), it contains features common to both didactic and persuasive prose; the title must be appropriate for abstracting and data bases; the text is performative by establishing a claim to ownership of ideas; the text is a report of objective facts and an interpretation of those facts; the text can be understood independently but it must be related to past texts and have potential as a progenitor of new texts; length, certain forms, and revisions are often dictated by the medium itself. The L2 scientists’ original submissions conformed to the constraints of the medium. The scientists’ changes to mode most noticeably appeared in their presentation of the moves (Swales, 1990) within the introduction, which outlines the rationale of their work.
Nonetheless, the texts continued to be reports of objective facts and interpre-tations of those facts. They were organized into recognizable sections consistent with introduction, method, and results, and discussion. Furthermore, the scientists appear to appreciate that their texts would be read now, and that they may also be used as a progenitor of new texts as their claims enter the community by means of publication in an internationally recognized English-language journal, thus allowing for further discussion by future researchers.
The research question examined here is: What do these lexicogrammatical changes reflect about differences in the register and genre of the manuscripts? The register the scientists created through the revision is quite different from the one in the initial submissions although an entirely new register was not created. The revised versions of their manuscripts became consistent with the scientific register that is expected in English-language scientific articles. In other words, only after revision to the register of the manuscripts were the scientists able to appropriately demonstrate the five practices that Hyland (2000) states are
required: establish novelty, make justifiable claim, acknowledge prior work, offer evidence of findings and demonstrate disciplinary ethos. Once the changes were made, the manuscripts were no longer criticized for their language use. In subsequent rounds of correspondence between the scientist and the journal staff after the acceptance by the journal of the revised submission, sometimes additional minor changes were made to correct syntactic matters. Criticism of the scientists’ use of language, however, disappeared.
The genre the Mexican scientists produced is never in doubt. The genre of each scientist’s original submission had already conformed to the genre of the scientific text, and so no new genre was created through the revised submission. They adhered to the fundamental introduction, method, results, and discussion structure, adding figures and references. Their overall purpose was to com-municate with a community of scientific peers about their research, whether it concerned the solution to a mathematical difficulty, the identification of a new species, or the detection of a previously absent virus. Their research was conducted according to accepted scientific procedures within the epistemologi-cal understanding of their respective disciplines. As further evidence of their adherence to the genre of the scientific research article, none of the journal reviewers questioned the suitability of the manuscripts for inclusion in a peer-reviewed English-language journal, despite their criticism of the language usage.
Conclusion
The scientists in this study all initially received critical commentary from journal reviewers. They told Roberto, ‘It would be a good idea that the authors have a native English-speaking geophysicist to improve the English usage in the paper’. A reviewer told Victor, ‘As English is not the author’s native language, there are many grammatical errors and other textual deficiencies’. Jesús was told that ‘someone needs to review the English grammar as it is pretty poor and therefore difficult to comprehend’. While not the focus of this paper, it is interesting to note that none of the three scientists consulted a native English speaker in making the revisions to their manuscripts (Englander, forthcoming). The reviewers are noting problems with ‘the language’ although the nature of the changes the scientists made to the manuscripts that were accepted are profound. These were not changes of mere subject-verb agreement or syntac-tic anomalies. Many of the changes made to the lexicogrammar instantiated changes of the metafunctions of language, and they instantiated changes to the register. Figure 1 provides a summary of the metaredundant framework implicated by the scientists’ lexicogrammatical changes.
k. englander 157
How Scientific Research Articles are Revised by Mexican English L2 Scientists to Achieve Acceptance
for Publication through SFL Analysis GENRE Scientific research article published in English-language peer-reviewed journal
[note: no revision to genre] REGISTER
FIELD TENOR MODE • Events more stationery • Scientist himself
• Motivation for the research explained coherently in the introduction section
META- FUNCTION
IDEATIONAL INTERPERSONAL TEXTUAL • More relational processes • More material processes
in passive • More passive
constructions • Lexicon conventions
observed • No lexical field of justice
or sentiment • Fewer scientist
participants with mental processes
• More attribution to other scientists
• More hedging • Fewer emphatics • Fewer attitude
markers • Less commentary
• Move structure of 1, 2, 3 achieved
• Fewer overly complex or especially long sentences
LEXICO- GRAMMAR
REPRESENTATION (selected examples)
EXCHANGE (selected examples)
MESSAGE (selected examples)
• is, are, is based on • are used ∆ based on • are targeted, are needed • is known, is recognized • tools allow us ∆ the aim is • Smooth-Hound Sharks ∆
smoothhound sharks • We must take advantage
∆ eliminated • This paper [attempts] to
make things even ∆ eliminated
• Many more citations • four species ∆ at least
four species • it is essential, it is
natural ∆ eliminated • tensor is a well-
known determinant ∆ tensor is commonly used
• shrimp [has grown] from a scarce ∆ shrimp production increased from . . .
• Jesús moves 3 ,1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 ∆ 1, 2, 3
• Roberto moves 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, ∆ 1, 3, 2
• Victor moves 1, 2 misrepresents gap, 3 all stated in passive voice ∆ 1, 2 overly wide but accurate, 3 four clear contributions
realized in
realized in
realized in
instantiated by instantiated by instantiated by
instantiated by instantiated by instantiated by
Figure 1: Systemic functional linguistic analysis of the revisions made to successfully published manuscripts
158 Revision of scientific manuscripts
According to Halliday, register allows for prediction. He suggests that when the social context of the language use is known, ‘we can predict a great deal about the language that will occur, with reasonable probability of being right’ (Halliday, 1978, cited in Lewin, Fine and Young, 2001: 9). Further, ‘if a particu-lar message does not fulfil all the expectations that usually attach to its type… it may evoke various kinds of confusion and ineffectiveness’ (Bazerman, 1998: 24).
This helps to explain the journal reviewers’ discomfort with nonnative texts that did not conform to a preconceived notion of what the language is that ought to occur. Register of the Mexican scientists’ original manuscripts was not consistent with the standard expectations of the register, although their manu-scripts displayed many characteristics of good academic Spanish writing. The reviewers claimed that there were features that were nonnative-like (Kourilová, 1996; Shashok, 1992), but they were not more precise in their comments. Consistent with Kerans’ proposition, the reviewers ‘may lack the metalanguage needed to talk about rhetorical problems thus… they rush to blame ‘the English’ vaguely whenever they are confused by [an English L2 ] writer’s manuscript’ (Kerans, 2001: 339). Lacking this metalanguage, they state that the organization is faulty, or that simply, the English is unclear. However, the analysis performed in this study indicates that, in fact, the editors are expecting an alteration in the register of the text. The violation of this expectation often triggers the injunction to consult a native English speaker.
This study has sought to explore revision of scientific texts produced by non-native speakers of English when they submit manuscripts to English language journals. Frequently scientists are told to revise their manuscripts in order to address various scientific concerns; however, this study focused on revision that is motivated by reviewers’ criticisms of ‘the language’. It seems clear that what is at issue is that the reviewers’ expectations of the register of the scientific article were violated; the accepted version of the manuscript construed the field, tenor, and mode somewhat differently as the manuscript’s lexicogrammar changed. Therefore, understanding the register more deeply may ultimately help L2 scientists to produce texts that are more acceptable to English-language journal editors so that these scientists can enter their work into the broader scientific world. Further, explicit knowledge of the constituents of register may help journal editors to better identify and explain the problems within texts submitted by L2 scientists so that the editors can better direct their comments in a manner that is helpful to the writers. Finally, those EFL and ESL specialists who prepare L2 scientists to publish can benefit by better understanding the constituents of the register and how the lexicogrammar creates that needed register.
Karen Englander received her PhD in TESOL and Composition from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is a professor in the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, in Ensenada, Mexico. Her research interest focuses on nonnative-English-speaking scientists and their writing. She is currently combining qualita-tive and quantitative methodologies to better understand their lives and work.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this article to the memory of Dr. Jorge de la Rosa Vélez, one of the scientist-participants in this study. I would also like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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