The Rhetoric Structure of Research Article Abstracts in English Studies Journals

Abstract

Writing clear and informative abstracts is a must for survival and promotion in any academic discourse community. Abstracts usually provide information about the background, the scopes and methodology of the research, the major findings and conclusions. Following Santos's (1996) model, forty research articles published in two English Studies journals were analyzed for the rhetoric moves they contain. Cross-disciplinary analyses revealed clear differences between the rhetoric structures of the twenty linguistics and twenty literature abstracts. It was found that the linguistics abstracts more ooen provided clear reference to the research scope, methodology and main results, while literature abstracts focused on the placement of the research into a wider context and offered a more tentative reference to the findings. Abstracts that contain less than three moves are ooen felt to be vague, especially for a reader who is an outsider to the close academic discourse community of the specific field of research. Differences were found between the abstracts published in the two journals, an explanation for which is difficult to find. An outcome of this research could be the sensibilization of expert researchers to the importance of writing clear abstracts, especially for journals that have wide readership, such as the large international community of scholars in English studies.