Conducting doctoral candidates in the writing of their dissertations by means of exploring descriptive studies in scientific writing

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting how enunciative approaches to scientific writing can contribute to the writing of doctoral dissertations. The results of a number of works are retaken, which relate to the comparison between the practice by specialists (from the analysis of a corpus composed of essays on Linguistics), and the practice by students at different levels (from a corpus composed of academic reports, dissertation chapters, or essays written by doctoral candidates). Such results are didactically explored as different exercises, which aim at allowing young researchers to work within three enunciative dimensions: the positioning of the author of the text (how to take a position in an objective text), the legitimating of his/her study object (how to present the bets in one’s research), and the intersection of the sources (how to integrate in one’s text the texts by others)..