I first felt the need for a book like this back in 1998, when I did
my MA in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK).
Whenever I started a new assignment, I
usually knew exactly what I wanted to write and had no trouble
organizing my ideas. What I lacked was a wider repertoire of
sentences like “A cursory glance at… reveals that…” or “… is beyond
the scope of this paper.” Without that kind of language, I feared I
would never truly belong to that kind of discourse community.
So here’s what I used to do: After each and every scientific
article I read, I made a list of useful phrases and sentence
“templates” that I could include in my own writing. This turned out
to be a wise move. When I eventually wrote my dissertation, I was
able to use at least 25-30% of the hundreds of sentences I’d
compiled.
Fortunately, I never deleted that list.
Back in 2013, as I was purging some old files, I stumbled upon the
original Word document and wondered if other people might find my
list useful. So I handpicked 70 sentences and turned them into a
blog post, which, at the time, I hastily dismissed as a novelty no
one would pay attention to. I couldn't have been more wrong.
To my surprise, those 70 sentences went on
to become my most popular post to date, with an average of 700
daily visits. It definitely looked as if I was on to
something.
So, one day, I had a crazy idea: What if
that blog post became a book?
So, in January 2015, I started compiling a brand new list, which
forced me to read hundreds of academic papers beyond the field of
Applied Linguistics (my area of expertise). I read lab reports,
medical experiments, doctoral theses on urban planning, literature
reviews on quantum physics, you name it. By December, I had amassed
nearly a thousand sentence frames. But the book was still far from
finished, of course.
The next step was to organize those sentences logically, check them
for naturalness/frequency against corpus data, trim the list down
to 600 items and write language tips that both native and
non-native speakers might find useful.
And that was the part that nearly drove me
insane. I lost count of the number of times I considered scrapping
the whole project, but a little voice inside my head urged me to
keep going.
I don’t know what the future has in store for The Only Academic
Phrasebook You'll Ever Need, but if it can help at least 1,000
people the way my list helped me back in the 1990s, my sleepless
nights will have been worth the effort.
Thanks, again, for downloading this book. Here’s how you can reach
me:
luizotaviobarros@gmail.com
luizotavio.com
facebook.com/thinkELT
Luiz Otávio Barros
November 2016