Applying Metaphor in Writing English Scientific Texts

DOI

10.2991/icla-17.2018.12How to use a DOI?

Keywords

English written text; lexical density; nominalization; SFL-based metaphor

Abstract

Most of English texts written by Indonesian students do not reflect the characteristics of English written text, even their texts resemble spoken texts conveyed through writing. A written text should be different from a spoken text for their different characteristics. The complexity of grammar in clause constructions of written texts may serve as the core distinguishing factor between the two kinds of texts. However, the question arises about how complex or how complicated the written text grammar is. This article is aimed at applying the concept of systemic functional linguistics-based metaphor (SFL-based metaphor) to distinguish a written text from a spoken text. In particular, this article applies the SFL-based metaphor concept in improving the dissertation proposal texts of the students. The application of the SFL-based metaphor concept is related to the lexical density of a clause through which a characteristic of a written text is generated. The realization of lexical density should give a credit to nominalization as a technique of reducing the number of clauses in a written text. Furthermore, a written text is closely related to a scientific text taking academicians including students, teachers, and lecturers as the readers. The data were 10 dissertation proposals written by the students of Linguistics Doctoral Program at the University of Sumtera Utara some of which are presented in this article to demonstrate the process of applying the SFL-based metaphor in improving the texts. Applying this concept is particularly helpful for those in the writing process of their final projects at universities.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Rusdi Noor ROSA
AU  - Rudy SOFYAN
AU  - Bahagia TARIGAN
PY  - 2017/10
DA  - 2017/10
TI  - Applying Metaphor in Writing English Scientific Texts
BT  - Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Languages and Arts (ICLA 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 64
EP  - 69
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icla-17.2018.12
DO  - 10.2991/icla-17.2018.12
ID  - ROSA2017/10
ER  -