What I write is not an academic tet....Marcela

WHAT IS AN ACADEMIC TEXT?

·         Jordan (1999, p. 8) states that "academic writing" must be written in a proper formal style.

·         Hamp-Lyons and Poole (2006, p. 16-17) also define "academic writing" in terms of formality. They state that academic writing is a formal piece of paper for which credit has to be given to the writer and that the work will contain specific grammatical patterns, organisation and argument.

First of all, « why I write » from George Orwell, it’s not an academic text because he shows so much subjectivity, for instance, when he tells what happened to him and how he felt.  In the second hand, you can find through all the text the use of the personal pronoun “I”. Written language is in general objective rather than personal. It therefore has fewer words that refer to the writer or the reader. This means that the main emphasis should be on the information that you want to give and the arguments you want to make, rather than you.

In the third point, why I write is not linear and I don’t think the author stands in one central point or theme with every part contributing to the main line of argument, he talks about so many things like stories about his life, what he remembers like poems, he tries to define the degrees in every writer but they are defined according to what the author thinks. Even you can’t see any reference to support what he affirmed.  Finally, I didn’t  see that facts and figures were given precisely, as I said before,  the author just talk about himself.