Commonality and individuality in academic writing: an analysis of conference paper titles of four scholars

Abstract

In the last two and half decades, scholars and researchers in Applied Linguistics and other allied fields have shown an increasing interest in titles of academic publications. The place of style at the level of the individual language user has, however, been under-researched. This study, therefore, investigates the extent to which titles of conference papers vary according to individual authors’ preferences and disciplinary proclivities. A total of 78 conference paper titles of four scholars (two each from the disciplines of Education and Applied Linguistics) constituted the data set for the study. The titles of each scholar were analyzed, based on four variables, namely lexical density, length in words, structural organization, and syntactic encoding, using both quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches. The findings show that the titles of individual scholars within the same discipline vary considerably. Both similarities and differences between the two disciplines regarding the construction of titles are also observed. The study concludes that, in general, titles maintain discipline-constrained and generic characteristics; yet, these titles are considerably characterized by individual preferences of the scholars. These findings of the study have Implications for the scholarship on the interface between individuality and disciplinarity, academic writing and further research