Academic reading - 2nd task

For this week's task, we had to take a closer look at a text's structure. To do so, of course, I had to pick a new text to read and instead of a regular academic article, I picked my first ever English commentary – related to Geography, of course. I've read commentaries before but while doing this task, I realized that this was my first time reading one in English. Though, after reading it, I suppose that the structure was very similar to other commentaries I've read so really, only the language was different.

The commentary I read was "Whose geography, whose future? Queering geography's disciplinary reproduction" and it was written by Eden Kinkaid, a fellow Geography student from the USA. To shortly summarize it, the author replies to a prompt about geography's future and praxis from the view of a transgender person.

Part of this week's task was to analyse whether the text uses the common IMRAD formula or not. I concluded that it didn't, as it isn't about any scientific research but instead someone's subjective opinion. There is a clear abstract to the text and the author also uses subheadings, but unlike the IMRAD formula demands, there is no conclusion at the end. However, as I wrote in my report on the Academic Reading Moodle page, you can clearly see from the text that it is written by someone familiar with academic texts, most likely the IMRAD formula too. The vocabulary was proper and there were plenty of difficult, academic words, and the author didn't make statements without basing them on something (even if that something was their own experience).

In that sense, although this commentary was a lot more casual than any other text I've read so far during this course, I would still very much say that it is an academic text.

We were also recommended to try out the AWL and ACL highlighters on the www.eapfoundation.com page. AWL is a highlighting tool that picks up academic words from the text, even ranking them based on rarity. ACL, again, picks out academic collocations. I tried both and had some varying results. The AWL highlighter picked plenty of academic words from the commentary but some of them were very common, at least in my opinion. Some of the rarer ones that it picked were 'contradictions' and 'implicitly'. I had less luck with the ACL highlighter, as it found barely any collocations from the text, one of the few it found being 'next generation'.

Overall, I do find the AWL and ACL highlighters useful, AWL maybe more so. Especially if vocabulary is something you struggle with, I would recommend trying them out. It's very quick way to scan even a longer text, so I don't see any cons to it. However, I also do recommend staying critical while using it, as many of my fellow students also said that their results had been varying.

References:

Kinkaid, E. 2024. Whose geography, whose future? Queering geography's disciplinary reproduction. Dialogues in Human Geography. Vol 14, Issue 2.

Reading: Skimming, Scanning, Summarising and other skills (eapfoundation.com)