Academic Writing Over Time:An Analysis Of Publications By Ken Hyland Written Between 1990 And 2016

Clear scientific writing is important for knowledge development and information communication,in which readability has always been an important issue.Readability refers to the ease with which a document can be read and understood.It has been investigated in a wide variety of contexts,including newspaper reports,government publications,military procedures,legal documents,advertisements,educational materials,and academic journals.Although much research has been conducted to investigate the readability issue,most of them has focused on the readability of academic texts composed by different authors and few has examined the readability of the articles written by a single author.Lei(2016)argued that investigating the changes of the academic writings of one “good writer” may provide us with helpful examples of clear scientific writing.Thus,the present study intends to investigate the trends in the readability of Professor Ken Hyland's single-authored articles from 1990 to 2016 and the relationship between the normalized citations of his articles and the readability scores in terms of the Flesch Reading Ease(FRE)and Mc Laughlin's Simple Measure of Gobbledygook(SMOG).The results indicated that:(1)Professor Ken Hyland's articles were difficult to read in terms of both FRE and SMOG scores.(2)Professor Hyland's writings became significantly more difficult to read over time,though the effect sizes were small.After he became an experienced writer and established his own writing style,the readability of his articles remained relatively constant.(3)There were no significant correlations between the readability scores and the number of normalized citations of his articles.Although the readability of academic articles may not associate with the citations,we still suggest that academic writing should be concise and readable.Limitations of the readability formulae(e.g.ignore the readers' motivation,interest,and prior background knowledge)are discussed and suggestions(e.g.investigate texts from the perspectives of N-grams and syntactic complexity)are also provided.