The Rhetoric Structure of Research Article Abstracts in English Studies Journals

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. Crossdisciplinary
analyses revealed clear differences between the rhetoric structures of the
twenty linguistics and twenty literature abstracts. It was found that the linguistics
abstracts more oen 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 oen 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.