Guide to Reporting Verbs: Citing Sources in Academic Writing

Guide to Reporting Verbs is an accessible guide to citing sources in academic writing across the disciplines. The way writers introduce previous literature is essential to authorial voice. Specifically, the effective use of reporting verbs can highlight important details about the cited work while allowing writers to present themselves as experts in their field. This reference guide lists the most common reporting verbs across various disciplines in the hard and soft sciences and provides important information about how they can be used in academic writing.

The book:

• lists prevalent reporting verbs across six disciplines: applied linguistics, biology, history, philosophy, political science, and physics
• provides information on authorial voice for each reporting verb
• highlights effective use of each reporting verb through inclusion of a definition, the lemma along with a few members of the word family, stance act(s), common contextual environments, example sentences from academic sources, the verb’s frequency in academic writing (based on two corpora, or databases), and the verb’s relative frequencies across disciplines
• offers practical tasks and exercises for students as online support material

Organized so that readers can use the guide as either a quick reference or a study aide, this resource will empower students to use appropriate, discipline-specific reporting verbs in their academic writing.

Grant Eckstein is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University, USA. He is the associate editor of the Journal of Response to Writing and co-author of Curriculum Development for Intensive English Programs (2022).

Jacob D. Rawlins is Associate Professor in the Linguistics department at Brigham Young University, USA. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Business Communication. His books include Language Prescription: Values, Ideologies and Identity (2020).

Elizabeth Hanks is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of South Florida. She uses corpus methods to address questions related to vocabulary, pragmatics, and register.