Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings / John M. Swales
01 Jan 1991-Vol. 1991, Iss: 1991, pp 1-99
About: The article was published on 1991-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 5640 citations till now.
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TL;DR: In this article, a double-entry coding scheme was developed to describe 5160 revision changes made to the manuscripts, in terms of five types of revision, i.e., substitution, correction, addition, deletion, and rearrangement, and four different lexico-grammatical levels, including morpheme, word, group and clause/clause complex.
48 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that figures stand in both presentational and subject matter relations to the text, and that the relationship between figures and text is one of a small set out of the larger possible rhetorical relations.
Abstract: We present a corpus-based study of coherence in multimodal documents. We concern ourselves with the types of relationships between graphs and tables and the text of the document in which they appear. In order to understand and categorize the types of relations across modalities, we are making use of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), and propose that this can adequately describe these types of relations. We analyzed a corpus comprising three different genres, and consisting of about 1500 pages of material and almost 600 figures, tables and graphs. We show that figures stand in both presentational and subject matter relations to the text, and that the relationship between figures and text is one of a small set out of the larger possible rhetorical relations. We also discuss several issues that arise in the treatment of multimodal material, such as the potential for multiple connections between figure and text.
48 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada is presented, where the authors trace three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary policy story.
Abstract: Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.
48 citations
TL;DR: The term "genre" first came into the field of second-language (L2) writing and English for specific purposes (ESP) in the 1980s, with the research of John Swales, first carried out in the UK, into the introduction section of research articles.
Abstract: The term ‘genre’ first came into the field of second-language (L2) writing and, in turn, the field of English for specific purposes (ESP) in the 1980s, with the research of John Swales, first carried out in the UK, into the introduction section of research articles. Other important figures in this area are Tony Dudley-Evans, Ann Johns and Ken Hyland, who have argued for the value of genre in the teaching of L2 academic writing. ESP genre analysis is a development of text linguistics and the description of academic genres, moving from a focus on lexicogrammatical features to rhetorical moves and, later, to a focus on rhetorical context (see Swales 2001 for a review). Systemic functional genre analysis (typically called the ‘Sydney school’) is a development of research such as that of Longacre (1976) and Labov & Waletzky (1967) and their analyses of the discourse structures of texts. Jim Martin and Joan Rothery are two important figures in the early development of systemic functional genre analysis; their work became the basis for the Disadvantaged Schools Project in Sydney (see Rose & Martin 2012 for a history). As an approach to the teaching of writing, genre-based pedagogy came into prominence in the US, in part as a response to process writing, which, it was felt, did not realistically prepare students for the demands of writing in academic contexts (Horowitz 1986). Genre-based pedagogy in Australia has a similar history and was a reaction to whole language and process writing, which were dominant in the teaching of writing in Australian schools at the time.
48 citations
07 Oct 2000
TL;DR: The algorithm and a systematic evaluation of a system which can recognize the most salient textual properties that contribute to the global argumentative structure of a text are presented.
Abstract: We believe that identifying the structure of scientific argumentation in articles can help in tasks such as automatic summarization or the automated construction of citation indexes. One particularly important aspect of this structure is the question of who a given scientific statement is attributed to: other researchers, the field in general, or the authors themselves.We present the algorithm and a systematic evaluation of a system which can recognize the most salient textual properties that contribute to the global argumentative structure of a text. In this paper we concentrate on two particular features, namely the occurrences of prototypical agents and their actions in scientific text.
48 citations