Academic communication crucially involves readers, or hearers, buying into an argument. The audience has to be hooked, involved and led to a desired conclusion, and this is perhaps no more urgent than in a Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT). In this competitive environment, doctoral students present their research using only one static slide…

Despite his considerable influence on the development of ESP and all our professional lives, almost nothing has been written about John Swales' distinctive prose style. Based on a 340,000 word corpus comprising 14 single-authored papers and most chapters from his three main books, this paper sets out to identify the main features of this style.…

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers, but few studies have examined the ways that small acts of reformulation and exemplification help contribute to this. Abstraction, theorisation and interpretation need to be woven into a text which makes sense to a particular community…