General Features of Academic Writing: a Case Study

GENERAL FEATURES OF ACADEMIC WRITING: A CASE STUDY
      INTRODUCTION     In academic writing, there are many feature groups that are widely used and take important role. Each of which have general functions and distribution in the writing, however, since there are many types of writing such as thesis, journal papers, research proposal,etc, so that the usages of these groups are also various. Therefore, an understanding about the functions and contributions of features of academic writing is essential in order to use them correctly and efficiently. In this small research project, I will examine three groups of features including qualifiers to make levels of certainty, citation method and organizational devices. There are really many studies on these issues in a general case such as Bloch, J. &Chi L. (1995), Ken Hyland & John Milton (1997), however, in this project I would like to concentrate on those writings in my research area, especially, physical-journal papers.
The research project is organized as following: the next section is devoted to Methodology presenting contents that I will look for in the chosen article. The findings and discussion will be given in section III. Section IV is conclustion.
      METHODOLOGY     In order to investigate the usage of the three groups of features in writing journal papers, I find and discuss their functions and distributions occurred in scientific paper name “_Spin Hall effect in a system of Dirac fermions in the honeycomb lattice with intrinsic and Rashba spin-orbit interaction_” published in Physical Review B (Dyrdal et al, 2009). The article includes 5 pages of text and are typical in my research area. For the purpose of this research project, I will look for phrases/words belonging to one of three groups as following:
Group I: certainty qualifiers includes words like clearly, generally, probably, etc, and phrases like according to… I also count modal auxiliaries like can, may, might.
Group II: Methods of...