When viewed from outside Anglophone culture - from the perspective of the foreign academic, EFL teacher or
translator, say e English Academic Discourse appears to be a relatively easy entity to define. Compared to the plethora
of alternative writing styles available to academics in some other cultures,1 it seems rigidly standardized and rulebound,
monolithic even. This impression is reinforced by the multitude of university courses and style manuals
available to teach it, not to mention the rigorous standards imposed by academic journals, all designed to ensure that
submitted texts are in line with community expectations. The total effect is of a massive impersonal machine, where
individual quirks are ironed out in the quest for uniformity and where there is no place for the ‘personal voice’ of the
kind that prevails in more humanistic cultures.
From within English academia itself, however, the picture appears more nuanced. Indeed, the impression of
homogeneity has been largely undermined by the large body of scholarship that has been undertaken by descriptive
linguists into the way in which academics actually do write in real life. Their work, which includes corpus-based
studies, genre analysis, disciplinary comparisons and contrastive rhetoric, suggests a wealth of variation between