Writing in and across Disciplines
LITERARY QUOTES: L1 ENGLISH WRITERS’ USE OF DIRECT QUOTATIONS IN LITERATURE PHD THESIS INTRODUCTIONS
1 2 Bojana Petrić , Masumi Ono
1
Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
2
Most writing guides advise students, regardless of their fields of study, to avoid overusing direct quotations, i.e. conventionally signalled verbatim repetitions of words from another source. However, research shows that quoting directly is a disciplinespecific practice: while extremely rare in natural sciences, it is relatively common in the humanities. Yet little is known about how direct quotations are used in the disciplines where this way of source use is appropriate. Focusing on one such discipline, Literature, our study aims to explore patterns of direct quotation use in PhD theses in Literature written by native speakers of English. A corpus of about 100,000 words, consisting of 15 PhD thesis introductions collected from three comparable literature departments at UK universities, was compiled and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Our findings provide a rich description of direct quotation patterns in the corpus, including the common types of quotations in terms of length and structural composition, the ways in which quotations are integrated into the writer’s text (e.g. as a stand alone clause or an element integrated into the writer’s sentence), the surrounding textual elements (e.g. reporting verbs and references to the author) and the wider cotext preceding and following the quotation (e.g. whether the writer introduces or comments on the quotation). Following the presentation of the findings, we will discuss how they can be utilised in the teaching of source use in academic writing courses for L2 students in Literature and related fields.