Editor: Peter Garrett (University of Cardiff)
Review editor: Terry Shortall (University of Birmingham)
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Volume: 13 Number: 1 Page: 49–55
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Concordancing Yourself: A Personal Exploration of Academic Writing
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David Coniam
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This exploratory study involves the construction and analysis of a corpus of an individual's own academic writing. Following an examination of the area of academic writing and the position of academic writing
corpora within it, the paper discusses how a 'personal corpus' might be put together, along with issues of the necessary quality and quantity of 'text', and problems which may arise in the construction
of a personal corpus. The paper also proposes a background, general 'reference', corpus against which features of academic writing may be measured. Despite its limitations, the most usable tool for the
small-scale researcher remains the concordancer. Some limited analyses of lexical, syntactic and discourse features are then presented to show how a potential personal profile might emerge. The paper concludes
with a discussion of the limitations facing the analysis of one's own writing, but suggests that, despite limitations, worthwhile insights can be gained in respect of one's personal language awareness.
Keywords: ACADEMIC CORPORA, CONCORDANCING, TEXT ANALYSIS
© Multilingual Matters 2004
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