Humour in Professional Academic Writing

Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition vol. 5 (1), 2019, pp. 43–54 10.31261/TAPSLA.2019.05.03 Krystyna Warchał University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8422-4911 Humour in Professional Academic Writing (with Some Implications for Teaching) Abstract Professional written academic genres are not typical sites of humour, especially in their final, published forms. In this paper, it is argued that academic discourse as construed today not only does not preclude humour in written research genres but—in some text segments or in response to specific communicative needs—is perfectly compatible with it. In particular, the discussion focuses on these occurrences which engage the reader and contribute to the writer-reader rapport: humorous titles, humorous comments or asides, personal stories, and literary anecdotes. It is also suggested that making university ESL/EFL students aware of the fact that “serious” writing tasks do offer some room for humour may draw their attention to the human face of academic writing, that is, to the interactive, dialogic, and personal aspects of written academic communication. Keywords: humour, English for Academic Purposes, academic writing, professional academic genres Humour in Academic Settings: An Introduction Professional written academic genres are not typical sites of humour, especially in their final, published forms. Indeed, studies on humour in academic contexts have largely focused on academic speech. For example, Lee (2006) examines humour in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), Nesi (2012) analyses laughter episodes in the lecture component of the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE), Fernández Polo (2014) carries out a multimodal analysis of conference presentations to identify episodes of humour or non-seriousness in the talks, and Ruiz-Madrid and FortanetGómez (2015) discuss the humorous potential of autobiographic references in 44 Krystyna Warchał plenary lectures. The problem of humour in academic writing is addressed by Skalicky et al. (2016), who examine the potential of certain linguistic features to act as predictors of playfulness, but their study focuses on undergraduate student writing, that is, on “school genres” (Johns & Swales, 2002, p. 14; see also Johns, 1997) rather than on professional text types. In this paper, it will be argued that academic discourse as construed today not only does not preclude humour in written research genres but—in some text segments or in response to specific communicative needs—is perfectly compatible with it. It is also suggested that making university ESL/EFL students aware of the fact that “serious” writing tasks do offer some room for humour may draw their attention to the human face of academic writing, that is, to the interactive, dialogic, and personal aspects of written academic communication. The examples quoted below come from published English-language texts by both native and non-native speakers of English: articles and monographs, all of them subject to editorial peer-review procedures.1 The functions of humour vary with the type of humour and the context in which it occurs. It is used to improve, to avoid face threats, and to bring relief from tension, stress, and anxiety, but also to attack, inflict harm, and destroy. As Nash puts it: For many of us, it is more than an amiable decoration on life; it is a complex piece of equipment for living, a mode of attack and a line of defence, a method of raising questions and criticizing arguments, a protest against the inequality of the struggle to live, a way of atonement and reconciliation, a treaty with all that is wilful, impaired, beyond our power to control. (Nash, 1985, p. 1) In many settings, including academic contexts (see, e.g., Lee, 2006; Nesi, 2012; Fernández Polo, 2014; Ruiz-Madrid, & Fortanet-Gómez, 2015), it helps create positive atmosphere, break the ice, bring people closer together, and grab the attention of the audience. Its potential as a social lubricant and an attention-grabber has also been noticed in the school environment, in particular, in a foreign language classroom. The use of humour in second and foreign language teaching and learning has been found to offer many benefits. For example, Minchew (2001) shows the effectiveness of playful classroom activities in exploring vocabulary and developing the awareness of style. In a recent study, Solska (2019) demonstrates that some forms of humour can be used as a powerful teaching tool in grammar instruction at advanced levels. Apart from its use as an instrument Fillmore (1967) appeared in E. Bach and R. Harms (Eds.), Proceedings of the Texas Symposium on Language Universals. Texas: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1 Humour in Professional Academic Writing… 45 in language teaching, humour has been found to build classroom rapport and to foster individual learning outcomes. In particular, it has been observed that humour “brings students and teachers together” (McMahon, 1999, p. 70), helps create positive classroom environment (Minchew, 2001, p. 59), lowers learners’ anxiety, increases their motivation for learning (Heidari-Shahreza & Heydari, 2018), and, as Tuncay (2007, p. 2) points out, “makes both teaching and learning far more memorable for all concerned.” Making students aware of the fact that elements of non-seriousness can be successfully used in professional written academic communication may contribute to the demystification of academic writing, which, while inevitable at virtually all stages of education, too often seems to be perceived as purposefully abstruse, depersonalised, and stilted. Before considering academic communication as a potential site of humour, an important caveat must be made. Identification of playfulness or tongue-incheek comments in texts whose main purpose is not amusement of the reader is not an easy task. Firstly, unlike jokes, such episodes are, in a vast majority of cases, not self-contained but closely tied with the non-humorous co-text, which makes them more difficult to single out. Secondly, the perception of humour is subjective. What elicits humorous reaction from one individual on one occasion may not be perceived as funny or diverting by another, or even by the same person in a different set of circumstances (Chiaro, 1992, p. 5). Even if we are cautious to maintain the distinction between humour comprehension and appreciation, as advised by Dynel (2009, p. 8), identification of a passage as humorous in an essentially non-humorous text often relies on individual reaction to it, which again is dependent on the disposition, knowledge, and prior exposure to similar texts on the one hand, and on various context-dependent factors on the other, such as, for instance, the main purpose of reading or listening and the time pressure. Examples quoted below reflect my own reading. Another potential problem is the apparently self-explanatory distinction be (...truncated)