Russian scientific style vs academic writing

Authors:
Abstract:

The presented article is a discussion about the problems and prospects of teaching academic writing in Russian at the universities of the Russian Federation. The aim of the article is to identify, based on the analysis of linguistic and methodological literature, what is new for Russian scientific writing, what will enrich its theory and practice and what is acceptable to Russian culture. The literature review shows that “academic writing” as a writing technique now trending in Russia is in demand and use only for teachers of English. The Russian language in this case has to take an auxiliary and secondary role, a temporary “crutch” employed to teach researchers how to write English scientific texts. The author believes that the concept of “academic writing” is just a technology for teaching the culture of written scientific communication in English, and a number of innovations and assertions postulated by academic writing are either debatable or unacceptable, and even destructive to Russian scientific style and Russian science. This is especially true for social sciences, which have their own terminology that has been developed over the years and which solve regional problems. The author considers the Roundtable discussions organized by the Commission on development of higher education and science of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation and Pushkin State Russian Language Institute to be of great importance for preserving the Russian language for Russian science. The author concludes that theoretical and methodological fundamentals of academic writing are not clearly formulated or recorded in comparison with Russian scientific writing, and the appeals to their mastering are mostly declarative in nature. The author proposes to attribute the concept of “academic writing” to writing texts in English.