A Stylistic Comparison Between English Abstracts In Chinese And American Engineering Journals

As present academic communication goes far beyond national borders, international publication or indexation has become a major reference for evaluating the academic importance of scientific researches. English abstract plays a key role in the assessment of research papers by international indexation systems like Ei (American Engineering Information) and SCI (Science Citation Index). However, due to limited English writing ability, inadequate understanding of international editing requirements and lack of corresponding instructions, many Chinese researchers have difficulty in writing qualified English abstracts and therefore lose chances for international academic communication.In order to deepen the understanding of differences between English abstracts written by Chinese and native scholars, find out problems in the abstracts of Chinese authors and explore practical writing instructions, the author has conducted a comparative study to examine the major differences in terms of linguistic features and information structures among three groups of sampled abstracts—abstracts by American authors, higher-level and average Chinese authors.The research involves both quantitative and qualitative methods: collecting data on the occurrence frequency of established research elements—tense, voice, personal pronouns, length, nominal structures, sentence complexities and thematic progression patterns; analyzing and comparing stylistic and functional differences between abstracts from the three corpora.The major findings include the three following aspects: 1) linguistic features differ variably in the three corpora, with similar structures of technical terms and sentence patterns, but more distinct differences in tense, voice and personal pronouns; 2) in view of information structure, the native English abstracts are found to have complete components in sufficient yet concise presentation, but in abstracts by Chinese authors, there is obvious lack of information components, and unnecessarily complicated Thematic Progression patterns in information development; 3) most evident differences are found between American and average Chinese authors, while the higher-level Chinese authors not only display similar stylistic features with average Chinese authors, but also are more approximate to international standard in text quality.A further study is conducted to find out the major problems with abstracts by Chinese authors concerning stylistic and linguistic features, and practical writing instructions on engineering abstracts are proposed, hopefully to facilitate Chinese engineering scholars to improve the quality of English abstracts and gain more access to international recognition and academic exchange.