Through Narrative Theory, the book offers an engaging panorama of the construction of specialised discourses and practices within academia and diverse professional communities. Its chapters investigate genres from various fields, such as aircraft accident reports, clinical cases and other scientific observations, academic conferences, academic blogs, climate-change reports, university decision-making in public meetings, patients' oral and written accounts of illness, corporate annual reports, journalistic obituaries, university websites, narratives of facts in legal cases, narrative processes in arbitration hearings, briefs, and witness examination accounts. In addition to exploring narration in this wide range of contexts, the volume uses narrative as a powerful tool to gain a methodological insight into professional and academic accounts, and thus it contributes to research into theoretical issues. Under the lens of Narratology, Discourse and Genre Analysis, fresh research windows are opened on the study of academic and professional interactions.

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood is a collection of essays in which life writing scholars theorize their early-career, mid-career, and late-career experiences with the documents that shape their professional lives as women: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion applications, publication and conference bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to compete for opportunities and resources. The essays explore the privacy laws, peer review, disciplinary standards, digital media, and other standardizing tools, practices and policies that impact women’s self-construction at pivotal junctures at which they promote themselves in the spaces of academic careers.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

Genres across the Disciplines presents cutting edge, corpus-based research into student writing in higher education. Genres across the Disciplines is essential reading for those involved in syllabus and materials design for the development of writing in higher education, as well as for those investigating EAP. The book explores creativity and the use of metaphor as students work towards becoming experts in the genres of their discipline. Grounded in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, the text is rich with authentic examples of assignment tasks, macrostructures, concordances and keywords. Also available separately as a paperback.

This volume investigates the features and challenges of medical discourse between medical professionals as well as with patients and in the media. Based on corpus-driven studies, it includes a wide variety of approaches including cognitive, corpus and diachronic linguistics. Each chapter examines a different aspect of medical communication, including the use of metaphor referring to cancer, the importance of ethics in medical documents addressed to patients and the suitability of popular science articles for medical students. The book also features linguistic, textual and discourse-focused analysis of some fundamental medical genres. By combining sociological and linguistic research applied to the medical context, it illustrates how linguists and translation specialists can build bridges between health professionals and their patients.

The book is an edited volume of carefully selected articles by eminent scholars focusing on the specialist knowledge transmission through genre variation, particularly on the issues of standardization and hybridity. The main focus was to analyse discursive popularization in the contexts and domains of natural sciences, law, and commerce, viewed in a diachronic perspective. The scholars involved have concentrated their studies on the creative transformation, hybridization, and even bending of genres used to popularise scientific, legal and commercial discourse for different communicative purposes and audiences, thus extending the conventional genre boundaries to disseminate specialized knowledge. The proliferation of specialized knowledge has indeed created a growing need to convey expert knowledge to a variety of addressees, with different levels of shared understanding and expertise. Such disciplinary knowledge can only be conveyed through various subtle manipulations of generic conventions keeping in mind the aims, the users, the media, the social contexts, and the domain with which specific knowledge is associated.

This book argues that adopting ethnographically oriented perspectives on research into academic writing is a valuable means of deepening understanding of the social influences on language use and individuals' experiences in academic writing contexts, helping to gain insider views of writers' experiences, writing practices, and the contexts in which academic texts are produced and assessed.

Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Handbook of Narrative Analysis is the first comprehensive collection of sociolinguistic scholarship on narrative analysis to be published. Organized thematically to provide an accessible guide for how to engage with narrative without prescribing a rigid analytic framework Represents established modes of narrative analysis juxtaposed with innovative new methods for conducting narrative research Includes coverage of the latest advances in narrative analysis, from work on social media to small stories research Introduces and exemplifies a practice-based approach to narrative analysis that separates narrative from text so as to broaden the field beyond the printed page

Many universities worldwide now require established and novice scholars, as well as PhD students, to publish in English in international journals. This growing trend gives rise to multiple interrelated questions, which this volume seeks to address through the perspectives of a group of researchers and practitioners who met in Coimbra, Portugal in 2015 for the PRISEAL and MET conferences. The volume offers truly global coverage, with chapters focusing on vastly different geo-social areas, and disciplines from the humanities to the hard sciences. It will be of interest to applied linguists, particularly those working in the area of English for Research Publication Purposes, and to language professionals working in research writing support, research supervision and academic publishing, as well as to journal editors and managers.