Squaring the Circle between Perceived Rhetorical Norms in Academic Writing and Developing an Individual Academic Writer Identity

Abstract

This paper sets out to examine the issues around the influences on academic writing practices and to what extent these influences are culturally, socially, institutionally or disciplinarily determined and whether multi-cultural, tertiary level academic writing classes can be effective in developing a student’s unique academic writer identity in English. Contrastive rhetoric (CR) studies and discourse studies have long since pointed to the existence of an internationally recognised style in academic writing and this, due to the indisputable dominance of global English, is the Anglophone rhetorical model. In this paper we set out to briefly analyse this model and to challenge some of the traditionally held views about the nature of the model and some of the notions held about its importance and use. Finally we propose some ideas as to how to tackle some of the notions and difficulties we raised in our study.

Keywords

• contrastive rhetoric
• global english
• academic writing
• discipline specific rhetorical norms
• third space pedagogy