| خلاصه مقاله | Abstract
Non-native English speaking (NNES) authors are increasingly being pressured to refer
to copy editors to have their manuscripts linguistically improved to get published
in accredited international journals. Despite the important responsibility that copy
editors shoulder in deciding the ultimate fate of academic papers, nearly no studies
have systematically explored the effects editing might have on specific writing features,
whether linguistically or stylistically, as a process meant to enhance the quality of the
paper. That is what we set out to do in the present research. Twenty research articles in
the field of dentistry written by NNES were randomly selected, and the original versions
were contrasted with their edited versions, trying to establish what shortcomings the
papers had in terms of Metadiscourse (MD) elements and how far the editing process
had succeeded in compensating for those drawbacks. Hyland’s (1998) account of
MD in academic texts, established by the frequency count of different MD elements
in native English Speaking (NES) authors’ manuscripts, was utilized as our basis for
comparison. The results revealed that NNES authors had paid scarce attention to proper
management of MD elements in their manuscripts for effective communication of the
propositional content, and that the editing process seemed to have changed little in
this regard. It is believed that the findings of this study have some implications for ESP
and EAP teachers, especially in academic paper writing classes, as well as copy editors. |