Academic discourse and intellectual styles

Abstract The paper borrows inspiration from three main sources: discourse organization and processing, genre analysis, and ethnography of communication. It explores cross-cultural variation in academic discourse on the basis of some English and Polish data from the field of language studies. Strategies of paper introduction are examined and compared with the help of an extended version of Swales' (1990) Move Analysis. It is argued that there exist potential areas of (in)compatibility between the two writing styles. These involve first of all the scope of information that is normally revealed in initiating a paper, and the rhetorical work that is done to handle academic face-phenomena.

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