Writing in Classical Languages

“Writing in Classical Languages.” WRI 210: Academic Research and Writing, Professor Zak Lancaster: Spring 2016.

This paper is extremely different than any of the other papers I had previously written. I abandoned the hollowed 5-paragraph essay format and prescriptive rules and instead began experimenting with linguistic features such as hedges and signposts.

This assignment was a case study, in which we evaluated the writing of a specific academic field. I selected Classics and reported on the linguistic features common in Classics articles. You will notice that my own descriptions of the Classics discourse patterns start to embody those very patterns themselves. The most poignant example comes in my analysis of the but..then statements that Sloan often employed:

"These not...but statements not only further contributed to the clarity of Sloan’s work but also aided in

more fully explaining his ideas."

This was not intentional. Having looked back on this paper, I believe that I must have subconsciously adopted these same features in my own writing simply because I thought they were indicative of universally "good writing." Never mind that the actual genre of my assignment was a Linguistics case study; in my mind, I must have viewed any piece of published writing as possessing linguistic features worthy of emulation.

For an interesting comparison (and a demonstration of my increased awareness as a writer), scroll below to another case study that I wrote my senior year (“Economical Writing”). Here, I describe the features of writing in Economics. Unlike the case study I wrote freshman year, this case study describes the features of the Economics discourse community, but in a way that conforms more to the Linguistics case study discursive expectations.

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