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

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkey
Elizabeth’s text
Time to Wake Up to the Facts about Sleep by Jim Horne
New Scientist: published on 16 October 2008, pages 36 to 38
In common with Mary, Elizabeth, chose a source text from the New Scientist. As was the case for
Anne, this was a text that Elizabeth already held on file. The text questioned popular myths about
people’s need for more sleep. Resembling the texts chosen by Victoria, Mary, Jane and Anne, this
article reports on recent research, although in this case the author of the text is one of the researchers
and refers to a study carried out by ‘My team’ (the IELTS text retains this). The author argues against
perceptions that people living in modern societies are deprived of sleep and draws on a range of
research evidence, including his own study, to support his view. Like William’s, this is a text that
involves argumentation and is organised around justifying a point of view. Reflecting the personal
tone of the original, Elizabeth retains the attribution by incorporating it into a brief contextualising
introduction following the title: ‘Claims that we are chronically sleep-deprived are unfounded and
irresponsible, says sleep researcher Jim Horne’.
Elizabeth cut the 1592 word source text by 60% to 664 words, making 54 edits. Like Mary, Elizabeth
cuts references to other texts – ‘(Biology Letters vol 4, p 402)’ – and removes a number of technical
terms: she removes the technical ‘metabolic syndrome’, but retains ‘metabolism’. She also chooses to
keep ‘obesity’, ‘insomnia’, ‘precursor’, ‘glucose’ and the very infrequent ‘eke’. Elizabeth’s source text
included relatively few academic and very low frequency words and more high frequency words than
the texts chosen any other writer (Figure 1 and Figure 2).
Like Anne and Victoria, Elizabeth replaces informal journalistic touches with more formal alternatives
– ‘shut eye’ becomes ‘sleep’ (although ‘snooze’ is retained), ‘overcooked’ becomes ‘exaggerated’ (but
‘trotted out’ is retained).
The most intensively edited section of the text is an extended quotation from a researcher. As was the
case for Anne and Jane, clarity and style seem to be important. Compare the following:
Original text: We did this by asking when they usually went to sleep and at what time they
woke up, followed by, ‘How much sleep do you feel you need each night?’
IELTS text: We asked respondents the times when they usually went to bed and woke up, and
the amount of sleep they felt they needed each night.
Another change may reflect the need for sensitivity to cultural diversity in IELTS mentioned by
Elizabeth in relation to her awareness of candidate background. The author’s assumption about the
identity of his readers seems to be reflected in one phrase that he uses: ‘we in the west’. In the IELTS
text this becomes the less positioned ‘most people in the west’. Rhetorically, Elizabeth retains the
function of the text as an opinion piece organised around justification of a point of view.
The changes made in editing had the effect of making the text easier to read according to both the
Flesch-Kincaid grade level estimate and the Coh-Metrix readability formula (Figure 3).
IELTS Research Reports Volume 11 www.ielts.org 36