An investigation of the process of writing IELTS Academic Reading ...

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkey
5.1 The non-experienced group
Victoria’s text:
How the brain turns reality into dreams: Tests involving Tetris point to the role played by
‘implicit memories’ Kathleen Wren
MSNBC: www.msnbc.msn.com published online 12 October 2001
Victoria’s text was a science feature published on the website of online news service MSNBC. It
describes research into the nature of dreams recently reported in the journal Science. The text is
organised around a problem-solution pattern. The problem is that of accounting for how dreams relate
to memory. The solution is provided by new research, based on the dreams of amnesiacs, identifying
dreams with implicit rather than declarative memories.
Victoria made the most extensive changes of all the untrained writers, making revisions to all but one
of the paragraphs in her text with a total of 77 edits. Uniquely, among writers in both groups her
adapted text was longer (by 44 words) than her source. It also involved an increase in AWL words and
a reduction in the most frequent words (BNC 1,000 word level) in the text (Figure 1 and Figure 2).
However, in common with all the writers in the study except Mathilda, the effect of Victoria’s
adaptations was to increase the proportion of words with a frequency in the BNC of one in 3000 or
higher.
Victoria reported that in editing the text she wanted to make it more academic in register and therefore
better suited to the context of university study. She had achieved this, she said, by increasing the
complexity of sentences, using passive forms and hedges to create academic distance and by adding a
methodology section to the article.
There are a number of changes that would seem to be directed at making the text appear less
journalistic. A reference to ‘Friday’s issue of Science’ in the opening paragraph, which reflects the
news value of the article, is removed (although this is the only reference in the article to another text).
These changes include reframing the relationship between writer and reader. The original text
addresses the reader as ‘you’, while the revised version instead employs ‘we’, passive constructions
or, in one case, ‘subjects’ (in the sense of research subjects). Contractions are replaced with full forms
or alternative constructions, as in, ‘the hippocampus isn’t is not active during REM sleep’ or the
substitution of ‘people with amnesia shouldn’t dream’ by ‘individuals suffering with amnesia should
not be capable of dreaming’.
Further changes to the text seem to reflect the intention to achieve a more formal, academic register.
These include the use of less frequent vocabulary – ‘different parts of the brain’ becomes ‘a region of
the brain’; nominalisation – ‘But they can still affect your behavior’ becomes ‘But they still have the
potential to affect behaviour’ (note that Victoria changes behavior to behaviour to reflect British
spelling conventions); use of reporting verbs – ‘said’ becomes ‘states’, ‘believes’ becomes ‘upholds’;
references to research procedures – ‘therefore’ becomes ‘from these results’, ‘the people in the
study…’ becomes ‘The methodology designed for Stickgold’s study had two groups of subjects…’;
and hedging – ‘Much of the fodder for our dreams comes from recent experiences’ in the original text
is prefixed in the adapted version with ‘Such research suggests that…’.
Pronoun references are made more explicit: ‘That’s called episodic memory’ becomes ‘To
differentiate this information from declarative memory, this particular [form] of recollection is
referred to by scientists as episodic memory’ and ‘…the procedural memory system, which stores
information…’ is expanded to give ‘…the procedural memory system. This particular system stores
information…’
IELTS Research Reports Volume 11 www.ielts.org 30