Genre and Graduate-Level Research Writing

In the context of the well-known pedagogical materials for graduate-level writers by Swales & Feak, An Cheng has written a resource that provides support for instructors who have the daunting task of scaffolding graduate writers’ efforts to navigate discipline-specific research genres–genres that may be unfamiliar to instructors themselves.

Genre and Graduate-Level Research Writing is grounded in genre-based theory and full of best practices examples. The book opens by presenting the case for the use of genre in graduate-level research writing and by examining rhetorical consciousness-raising and its ties to genre. Unique to the volume is a thorough analysis of the materials designed to teach genre and research writing-focused on the textbooks of Swales & Feak (e.g., Academic Writing for Graduate Students) and similar texts. Other chapters provide examples of discovery-based genre tasks, evaluative methods for assessing discipline-specific writing, and techniques for becoming a more confident instructor of graduate-level research writing.