Linguistic aspects of writing for professional purposes

• Author: Greta Përgjegji
• Position: Lecturer of Armed Forces Defence Academy , Albania
• Pages: 72-76

ISSN 2410-3918

Acces online at www.iipccl.org IIPCCL Publishing, Tirana-Albania

Academic Journal of Business, Administration, Law and Social Sciences Vol. 2 No. 1

March 2016

72

Linguistic aspects of writing for professional purposes

Msc. Greta Përgjegji

Lecturer of Armed Forces Defence Academy , Albania

Abstract

Writing for Professional Purposes is considered as a means of communication between

professionals who belong to two communities that have different languages, but share the

same knowledge or expertise. The article gives a hint on how writing for specific purposes

evolved to give rise to the creation of Writing for Professional Purposes. The social, cultural

and cognitive aspects are an essential part of Writing for Professional Purposes since the

physical act of writing cannot be considered only a result or product of the knowledge the

individual possesses but also a social and cultural act. Therefore, the social and cultural aspects

of writing explains the specificities and the intricacies of the effects these aspects have on

writing for it is considered as an inseparable part of social and cultural groups. On the other

hand, the cognitive aspect of writing explains and emphasizes the mental activities of the

individual during the decision-making process while he/she is writing planning and editing

their material having in mind the audience. On the same line of reasoning, writing for

professional purposes in a second language means that the writer has to consider the audience

twice; first, there is an audience who shares the same knowledge or expertise and second, the

audience does not have the same language. Consequently, writing in another language that is

not the first language with a specific jargon as well as a specific grammatical structure brings

about a lot of difficulties. Hence, writing in professional contexts in the mother tongue implies

only writing in a specialized version of a language already known to the writer, but writing

in a target language means that the writer has to learn the target language and the specialized

version of that language.

Keywords: Writing for Professional Purposes, social and cultural aspect, mother tongue,

cognitive aspect, target language, differences.

Introduction

According to Gotti (1991), “a language is considered as specific if it fulfills the following

conditions: it places the emphases on the user (the didactic area), the referring reality

(the field of the pragmatic function) and the use of the specialized language (the

professional language area). While, Shkurtaj (2009) considers the specialized language

used in a professional context closely related to the environment it is used as well as

that the written communication of the institution expresses and symbolizes the social

and the political authority of that institution. For these reasons, different researchers

like Flanegin & Rudd (2000) or Pakir (1999) stress the importance that the English

has acquired as a means of written communication in professional context because

of the fact that the English language has already become a Lingua Franca throughout

this globalized world. Writing for professional purposes contains a considerable

number of terms that can be combined in a unique way to form fixed set expressions

used and understood only by a specific professional community. Except the terms

this written form of the target language involves different stylistic and grammatical

sentence structures. Hence, although the writer has a considerable expertise in his