188 – Analytical language 1: sentences
just part of the evidence you could call on in your own answer to the
larger dramatic question posed by the play as a whole. You will see,
then, that the italicising of titles and the enclosing within quotation
marks of quotations and references to words is more than just another
inexplicable convention of academic writing. It marks the difference
between two separable categories of experience.
It is not just literature students who must deal with texts and
the differences between words and things. The texts of both primary
and secondary sources in any discipline constitute verbal evidence
with which your own analytical writing must deal. It is therefore
important that you think carefully before assuming that there is no
distinction to be made between what a source is talking about and
the words in which the idea is couched. To help you appreciate
this distinction and to use it in your writing, it is often valuable to
compare the accounts of the same thing given by different authors.
You will remember that in chapter 3 we conducted such an exercise
on three different accounts of the opening to Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
Object-language and meta-language
Finally, there is a large vocabulary of terms especially characteristic
of academic writing which is used to refer to the participants and
processes of academic enquiry itself – what is often called a ‘metalanguage’. These terms have already been made much use of in this
book, so you will be familiar with many of them. They include all
those terms which express what academic authors and enquirers do,
introduced in earlier chapters, for example:
proposing, acceding, conceding, refuting, dismissing, reconciling,
describing, comparing, defining, explaining, theorising, justifying,
evaluating, extending, elaborating, enhancing, generalising,
particularising.
Then, there are many other nouns and nominals associated with these
activities, for example:
just part of the evidence you could call on in your own answer to the
larger dramatic question posed by the play as a whole. You will see,
then, that the italicising of titles and the enclosing within quotation
marks of quotations and references to words is more than just another
inexplicable convention of academic writing. It marks the difference
between two separable categories of experience.
It is not just literature students who must deal with texts and
the differences between words and things. The texts of both primary
and secondary sources in any discipline constitute verbal evidence
with which your own analytical writing must deal. It is therefore
important that you think carefully before assuming that there is no
distinction to be made between what a source is talking about and
the words in which the idea is couched. To help you appreciate
this distinction and to use it in your writing, it is often valuable to
compare the accounts of the same thing given by different authors.
You will remember that in chapter 3 we conducted such an exercise
on three different accounts of the opening to Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
Object-language and meta-language
Finally, there is a large vocabulary of terms especially characteristic
of academic writing which is used to refer to the participants and
processes of academic enquiry itself – what is often called a ‘metalanguage’. These terms have already been made much use of in this
book, so you will be familiar with many of them. They include all
those terms which express what academic authors and enquirers do,
introduced in earlier chapters, for example:
proposing, acceding, conceding, refuting, dismissing, reconciling,
describing, comparing, defining, explaining, theorising, justifying,
evaluating, extending, elaborating, enhancing, generalising,
particularising.
Then, there are many other nouns and nominals associated with these
activities, for example: