GENRES IN SCIENTIFIC

AND TECHNICAL ENGLISH

 1. The concept of genre
• It is a central concept in all languages of speciality
(Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993).
• All epistemic communities need to rely on genres in
order to communicate internally.
• Examples of genres: Journalism: news, report, editorial;
Science: conference, research article, popular article,
report, etc.; Business: commercial letter, meeting,
report.
• So, genres can be written or spoken. They are
communicative acts sharing the same formal and stylistic
conventions.
 2. Genre macrostructure

• Divided into two structures: primary and secondary.

– Primary structure: sections. In the RA the sections are: title,

abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion,
references.

– Secondary structure: each section is divided into functions

according to its lexical meanings, propositional meanings, etc.
 3. Scientific vindication

• When a scientist has something new to

present s/he vindicates it, modifying the
established scientific paradigm. This fact
produces a convulsion in the scientific
community, which has to be solved by
means of tentative and politeness.
 4. Tentative language
• Scientific and technical studies are divided into:
popular science studies and research studies.

– Popular science articles have a much more

assertive language, because they do not need to be
accepted by any scientific community.

– Research articles have a tentative language since

they are still not accepted by its scientific community.
 5. Academic politeness
• Two features: presentation clarity and
references to previous research works.

• Academic politeness is expressed by means of

modal verbs (may, might, could), epistemic
verbs (suggest, think, consider) and whole
expressions (it could be considered that..) (this
would make us think that..) (one conclusion
which may be drawn is..). Generally, this
discursive devices are known as HEDGES.