ACADEMIC WRITING AND TEXTUAL REVIEW: THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING IN PHD DISSERTATION

Abstract

ABSTRACT

In its writing process, a text can goes through several stages, being textual review one of them, in order to make it appropriate to taken at the public. Thus, in this study, we focus on academic genre: PhD dissertation in the stage of the textual review, we aim to investigate if the procedures and interventions that have been performed by reviewer may interfere in the meaning, be committing it or expanding it, by analyzing, mainly, the interaction between the author and the reviewer. The professional who works with the review of the academic texts, almost always in freelance ways, usually has professional training in areas such as Literal Arts and Communication, for example, however, he works with productions in different areas of the knowledge: Human Sciences, Exact Sciences, Medical Areas etc. Based on that, we had the interest to reflect about the way such as the reviewer build meanings in his relationship with a production, even if he is not part , necessarily, of his target audience, we aim also to work on the relevance of the review to the proper presentation of the text; we aim to reflect about the construction of meaning, through the interventions and it issues applied by reviewer; we seek to verify the possibility of the reviewer questions point to the authorship in academic texts, in review process. Therefore, we present our considerations about the textual review and the reviewer, based especially on authors who deal with this issue, at the national level, such as Oliveira (2016), Ribeiro (2009; 2016), Salgado (2010; 2017), among others. Besides that, it was necessary to define the academic genre PhD dissertation, based mainly on Bakhtin’s contributions (1997; 2011), since we are dealing with a genre mainly written- secondary-, addressing its three pillars, that are : language style, compositional structure and subject content, touching, still, in its dialogic and interactional character. Regarding to the construction of meaning in the review stage, we have been considered it from a discursive linguistic perspective, since the reviewer, to process his comprehension of the text as well as to “negotiate” the meaning with the author, is guided by linguistics resources, using factors such as cohesion, coherence, and/or activation of the acceptability factor, for example, allowing us to observe the relevance of the factors of textualization in its relationship with the author. About this, the author characterizes it as an instance in the text, we based on Bakhtin (2011), Barthes (1984), Foucault (2002) and Possenti (2001; 2002), and we highlight the signs, according to Possenti, that estimate its presence in the text. In methodological aspects, we select two PhD Dissertation which are under review; that have being reviewed by two different professionals, by presenting , interactive balloons, whereby the reviewer negotiate with the author , and, also the final version, after adjustments, in order to compare them, to verify what was the author attitude in reply to the reviewer suggestions and questions. Thus, in order to promote the organization of our data, we establish analysis of categories for interaction and based on them, we verify what inaccuracies in communicating problems, by the reviewer, when he says “I did not understand” or “confusing stretch”, without further comments or suggestions, which may jeopardize the meaning construction (s) of the text in this stage of the text production.