Academic Writing Study on The Economist

planRED 楼主

As we all know the articles on The Economist are always  academically precise and rigorous. As a English learner, I found some of them are quite useful for a beginner.  To make progress together, I will post some articles, mostly some easy-to-read and rich in writing skills, on this BBS. This will be a continuously updated series and start from today!


Now let me introduce the first one, an excellent example for academic writing, which I read in the bus this morning You will think that I have a somethingPad or other advanced electric gadget. To clear this, I add the picture.



The central banks act
Battening down the hatches

http://www.economist.com/blogs/f ... 1/central-banks-act

1. The word "seen" is very useful in academic writing, especially in chart description.

THE past 24 hours have seen a flurry of action around the world, in response to growing concern about the euro zone's sovereign-debt crisis.

2. Please pay attention on how to use "First" and "Second"

The EFSF will be able to lever its meagre 440 billion in capital (less amounts already committed to rescues for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal) in two different ways. First, by using its resources to guarantee 20% to 30% of the bond issues of struggling peripheral economies and, second, by creating "co-investment funds" that (it is hoped) will attract money from other investors and which can be deployed to buy bonds.

3. How to use "—"

For now, however, the most significant near-term threat to the global economy—the problems of debt and contagion in the euro zone—continues to grow.

planRED 楼主

well, I found a bug when editing the post. You can not write down an euro symbol in a post. The sentences will be cut off from the sign.
here is the evident.

planRED 楼主

"THE HELP"
When you try explain the cause of something, especially in chart writing, the word "help" will help you make your sentences smooth. Using it with "explain" makes your words gorgeous.
Check the examples below:

The country’s primary energy supply is coal, which helps explain its high carbon emissions.
-- "The dirty, clean Czech Republic", http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/12/energy

The slowdown of the economy and immigrants returning home are thought to help explain this.
-- "Baby bust", http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/us-birth-rates

loveinit

Thanks for sharing! You really read each article carefully also thanks for your notes!

lslglb

thank you ~

planRED 楼主

The Higgs boson: Fantasy turned reality


http://www.economist.com/node/21541797

How complex a sentence could be?

This morning I read an article about Higgs Boson in the bus to my office. I don't read articles like this one since the last IELTS reading test. With many science words in it, this could be an impossible mission for a beginner, me. There are still several misunderstands, though, I finished this task before I got off the bus. Now I want to share some long sentences with you.

1. quite easy start, aha?
WELL, they’ve found it. Possibly. Maybe.

2. something noisy
The Higgs boson, for those who have not been paying attention to the minutiae of particle physics over the past few years, is a theoretical construct dreamed up in 1964 by a British researcher, Peter Higgs (pictured above), and five other, less famous individuals.

3. getting hot
The announcement, by Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tonelli—the heads, respectively, of two experiments at CERN known as ATLAS and CMS—was that both of their machines have seen phenomena which look like traces of the Higgs.

4. real challenge
The best that can be hoped for are patterns of breakdown particles from Higgses that are, themselves, the results of head-on collisions between protons travelling in opposite directions around CERN’s giant accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

ascii

Since i have seen king'moderator 's awesome topics yesterday, and your column now.
I've make a important and tough decision, i am going to join your campaign, not matter how bad my grammar is.
Get ready to welcome me, and be careful of my sentences, it sometimes shine, it sometimes suck.

ascii

THE past 24 hours have [seen] a flurry of action around the world, in response to growing concern about the euro zone's sovereign-debt crisis.
在过去的24小时世界各地发生了一连串针对欧洲区的主权债务危机的反应动作。
【 i read phoenix's news channel occasionally, now I see it  helps to build words.】

ascii

The EFSF will able to lever the capital in two different ways. First, by using its resources to guarantee 20% to 30% of the bond issues of struggling peripheral economies and, second, by creating "co-investment funds" that (it is hoped) will attract money from other investors and which can be deployed to buy bonds.

why it is not '...., and, second, ...'
but ' ...and, second, '

planRED 楼主

I have bought a real <The Economist> at a small book store. What I have to say is that this is really AWESOME!
There is no writer name under the articles in this magazine. That means all the editor are using the same writing style. that is unreal...
Anyway, I deadly love it!  

planRED 楼主

ascii 发表于 2012-1-14 12:42
The EFSF will able to lever the capital in two different ways. First, by using its resources to guar ...

I have found this one or two times and don't know the reason either. But that looks very cool.

planRED 楼主

GRAPHS & TABLES

If you want to take IELTS test, it is vitally important to learn how to write essays about tables or graphs. It is not as easy as you think. To get start, you have to first learn some keywords. Here is an example for this.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/g ... 2/02/daily-chart-10

BUSINESSPEOPLE around the world are still gloomy about the outlook for the global economy, but they are a bit less gloomy than they were last October, according to The Economist/FT survey of over 1,500 senior executives, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Overall confidence (the balance of executives who think the world economy will improve against those who expect it to worsen) rose from -39 percentage points to -28. Only in the Middle East and Africa have executives grown glummer. Yet despite these gloomy views, more companies expect to hire than fire in the months ahead. Technology companies are the most bullish: 61% of tech executives surveyed expect their workforces to grow this year. By contrast, more than half of telecoms companies see redundancies on the horizon.

planRED 楼主

Lost economic time: The Proust index

http://www.economist.com/node/21548255



Here is another article, from <The Economist>, that will effectively help you improve your academic writing skill. I have highlighted several useful sentences. But for some who really want to learn something, the only way to gain high score is studying by yourself. So read the original writing first.


the economic crisis rumbles on.

Our clock uses seven indicators of economic healty, which fall into three broad categories.

1...2... Real wages and unemployment make up the third.

Stockmarkets give some of the starkest results.

The main indices has improved markedly since then: the S&P is back to around 90% of its peak value.

Greek stocks were higher in 1992 than today: 20 years have been wiped away.

Recent performance is actually quite good from a historical perspective.

But history also offers a warning: it took 25 years for American stock to regain their 1992 high and Japanese stocks have never made it back to their peak.

Britain has suffered less dramatic drops in house prices

The costs of this lost are huge: Brithsh households' properities wealth, in today's prices, is around 500 billion pounds short of its peak; American households have lost a whopping 9.2 trillion dollors.

How quickly economies make up lost time will depend on where they have ceded ground.

Some indicators may bounce back quickly: share prices are forward-looking measures of expected returns that are constantly being reassessed. Just as they can crash down they can jump back up, boosting wealth.

Other indicators are more sluggish. Measures of output tend to crawl, not jump.

One such measures, nominal GDP, is a vital metric of government's debt sustainbility.

Of the G7 group of large economies, only Germany has not gone backwards.

In ten of them real wages were lower in 2010 than previously

The crisis blew all those gains away.

In Britain it is at its worst for 17 years.

But many advanced countries have managed to reduce the joblessness to new lows in the year before 2007

In euro area job prospects diverge hugely

For some, the time lost to the crisis will never be recovered.

planRED 楼主

Digital shopkeepers

http://www.economist.com/blogs/g ... 12/04/daily-chart-2

MUCH of the world may still (or again) be in recession, but the internet keeps growing—and so does its economic weight. In the G20 countries, the internet economy will grow at more than 10% annually for the next five years and by 2016 reach $4.2 trillion, or 5.3% of GDP—up from $2.3 billion and 4.1% in 2010, according to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). But there are big differences between countries. Britain leads the pack. Its internet economy is now bigger than its construction and education sectors, mainly thanks to the popularity of e-commerce. To paraphrase Adam Smith, the country has become a nation of digital shopkeepers. China and, to some extent, India stand out thanks internet-related exports in goods and services, respectively. South Korea and Japan are also strong in both e-commerce and exports. Europe punches below its weight, mainly because its internet economy is held back by a lack of a single digital market. If the European Commission succeeds in creating one, the old continent may be able to pull ahead of the new one by 2016.