ApisitJunkun

Dr.P.J. Moore
EAP506
April 23rd, 2020
Language Analysis Paper

The article that I choose to for this analysis is “Exploring crime patterns in Mexico City”,

written by C. A. Piña‐García and Leticia Ramírez‐Ramírez [1]. To analyze the language of this article,

I follow the 9 writing choices, excluding contradiction, from Swales and Feak’s book [2].

The first one is the first-person pronoun used in the paper [2]. In this research, the authors

decided to use the first-person pronoun and also have sentences that avoid the first-person pronoun in

the paper [1]. For example, the sentence, “This research is intended to provide information on short-

term trends alongside additional online data on the characteristics of victims and nature of crime” [1, p.

2], does not have first-person pronoun but the sentence, “We compare and analyze how people report a

crime through the traditional system and using social media”, has we as a subject [1]. I think the

authors decided to do these because they might want their article to have a wide range of writing types.

In addition, the first sentence provides general information of the article, therefore, the authors might

want to focus on the research to be the subject of the sentence, but the second sentence is opposite.

They might emphasis the method, thus, they decided to use themselves to be the subject.

The next point is negative forms [2]. There are both types of negative sentences in this paper

[1]. For instance, there are “… the rest of the crime reports show no patterns …” [1, p. 7] and “… this

manuscript cannot provide a comprehensive review …” [1, p. 6]. These could be considered that

negative forms are not strict in this field. The first sentence may want reader to focus on the object of

the sentence due to not using a negative form. However, the second sentence may give priority to the

verb of the sentence.

The third one is using vague expressions [2]. This article does not have expressions, but the

authors specified the information such as “It is important to note that this situation is derived from a

high rate of criminal acts such as robberies, card frauds, homicides and various street crimes” [1, p. 2].
In my view, the authors did this because they wanted the exact examples and provide more background

knowledge of the article to readers.

The fourth one is the second-person pronoun [2]. There is not the second-person pronoun, you,

in the article but the authors used the passive voice to avoid using you [1]. For example, the sentence,

“It can be seen from this array, that there is a moderate correlation between official data (y-axis) and

our collected tweets (x-axis)” [1, p. 12], could be used you as the subject of the sentence with active

voice but the author did not do that. From my perspective, this might make the article more formal and

also want the sentence to be more fluent.

The fifth choice is direct questions [2]. I cannot see any direct questions in the article. However,

there are some indirect questions such as “We compare and analyze how people report a crime through

the traditional system and using social media” [1, p. 1]. It may be because of formality that makes the

authors selected it.

The sixth one is the adverb position [2]. There are places that adverbs are placed in the

sentences in the article such as “In order to comply with Twitter terms of service, data cannot be

publicly shared” [1, p. 6] and “In this regard, we have collected publicly available tweets …” [1, p. 6].

The adverbs can be in the mid and final position of these sentences. I think using the different position

of adverbs helps sentences be more variety and also provides choices for which words the authors want

to emphasize.

The seventh choice is splitting infinitives [2]. There is an example of splitting infinitives in the

article, “… we found that more targeted work will need to be done to fully understand these data

sources …” [1, p. 20]. In my view, this can be interpreted that splitting infinitives can be done in this

field.

Using many words is the eighth choice [2]. As I can see from one of the sentences in the article,

“However, official reports provide the best possible way to explore and study this type of social issue”
[1, p. 3], this is not complex while providing useful information without unnecessary adverbs or

adjectives. Therefore, I think this article is not wordy and it is simple to read.

The last choice is using voices [2]. This article using both types of voice [1]. For instance, the

sentence, “A process of data cleansing was carried out with the aim to detect, filter and remove corrupt

or inaccurate records” [1, p. 6], uses passive voice and the sentence, “Google Trends is the search

volume for a given query relative to the total number of searches on Google on a scale of 0 to 100” [1,

p. 7], uses active voice. In my view, it depends on which noun a writer wants to emphasize. This will

help readers understand more easily.

Bibliography

[1] C. A. Piña‐García and L. Ramírez‐Ramírez, "Exploring crime patterns in Mexico City Open
Access," Journal of Big Data, vol. 6, no. 65, pp. 1-21, 2019.
[2] J. M. Swales and C. B. Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2012.