Warning: This article contains humor, which may not be appropriate for some of you, particularly if you have the sense of humor of a grapefruit. Reader discretion is advised. You will miss this trailblazing, earth-shattering, possibly Pulitzer-prize-winning contribution to the literature. However, that's okay. To accommodate your…

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…

Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. In its most benign and neutral definition, jargon signifies "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group." More often, however, the jingly word that Chaucer used to describe "the inarticulate utterance of birds" takes…

The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term "proximity" to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features…

This paper examines the underlying genres of philosophy focusing especially on their pedagogical forms to emphasize the materiality and historicity of genres, texts and writing. It focuses briefly on the history of the essay and its relation to the journal within the wider history of scientific communication, and comments on the standardized forms…

This study investigates the ways writers comment on the results of their research. Making claims in the form of Commenting on Results is a key move in discussion of results sections. Using data drawn from published journal articles and master dissertations in Language Teaching, the study investigates how published academics and students writing…

The author's therapeutic experience of writing a book about a personal tragedy led her to investigate the fledgling interdisciplinary field of Writing and Healing to see if it holds implications for the teaching of basic writing and also to revisit the debate about personal versus academic writing in the introductory composition class. The result…

Describes the analysis of communicative moves in discussion sections across seven disciplines. A number of marked interdisciplinary and native speaker/nonnative speaker differences were found in the types and number of moves and move cycles. Findings have relevance for the teaching of research writing, which may help English for special purposes…