Academic Writing: Origins and Impact of Eloquence

The article deals with the unsettled question whether academic scientific writing can be eloquent and possess some expressive characteristics and what impact it has on the reader. Historically the evolution of classical science to post-non-classical one was marked with substantial changes in the stylistics of scientific genres. Post-non-classical science is characterized by profoundly new conceptual notions, interpenetration of different forms of discourse, and the use of expressive linguistic means and emotional components in research papers. The current paper shows that notwithstanding the apparent antinomy, the formal and expressive functions of academic writing can effectively “coexist” in modern science. The objective of the present paper is to identify socio-historical grounds for tolerance to emotional representation of academic knowledge, to describe the changes in post-non-classical science, which made emotiveness possible in academic writing, to reveal the ways of communicating emotiveness in academic discourse. The main methods of this research include textual and stylistic analysis of academic articles and their titles, selected from scientific journals indexed in authoritative databases and materials of British National Corpus. It was revealed that the scope of expressive vocabulary in academic writing depends on the genre of scientific prose. The linguistic expressive means used by the representatives of both humanities and natural sciences and technology include: metaphor, metonymy, epithets, intensifying adverbs, quantifiers, the use of precedent texts, assertion of the author’s style and gender identity.