When we read crime novels or murder mysteries, there are a few things we might expect to see: a crime or a murder, a detective or two (usually polar opposites in terms of social skills), a few suspects (some more suspect than others), twists and turns in the plot, a dramatic climax, and, perhaps, some resolution. Your expectations might differ from mine, but you get the idea. The way we read, the way we understand a text, is expectation driven, and when texts don’t meet those expectations, they’re variably disappointing, confusing, thrilling, ingenious...

So what happens when we read texts we’ve never read before, or texts we’re not familiar with? And what happens if we’re expected to produce those kinds of texts, having relatively little experience of them and the expectations of our potential readers?

Pupils, students, researchers---all of us---meet these kinds of unfamiliar texts: we read them, we try to understand them, we might (re)produce them, maybe get some tips on how to read or write them (even why to read or write them), and, gradually, we become more familiar with them---or some of us do---a continuous cycle of learning by experience.

You may not have been asked to read or write crime novels, but chances are you’ve been asked (or told) to write a report, an essay, or a paper. It’s an integral part of learning, at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education, and one that all pupils and students have to face at some point. We start with fairly simple texts (although they’re rarely simple at first) like “When I Grow up I Want to Be...” and “What I Did Last Summer,” and then, as they become more familiar and we begin to master the techniques, the expectations, we move on to more advanced texts: science reports, argumentative essays, theses.

That’s part of the background, the motivation, for my recent article in Functions of Language.* I wanted to find out more about those conventions and expectations, how they’re encoded in the text, in this case in a collection of English-language medical research articles.

Why medical texts? Well, I chose them for a number of reasons, including the fact that, worldwide, English is more or less a lingua franca in medical education and research, regardless of whether you have English as a first language. Also, despite the considerable interest in exploring the linguistic and rhetorical features of medical research articles, and the educational relevance of doing so, there’s surprisingly (to me at least) little work that looks at these texts as a whole. Medicine is a broad and fascinating discipline, a highly influential one too, with important social and scientific implications---more good reasons to examine these kinds of texts. But it could have been another discipline or a combination of different disciplines, I suppose; the choices that led me to medicine were many, some intentional, some coincidental.

In the study, what I found interesting was not just the patterns, the similarities across the texts, but the differences, the choices available to and made by authors. There’s great diversity in these “generic” texts, despite their surface appearance. So while it’s important to observe patterns and make generalizations, it’s equally important to note, to celebrate, the differences. “Genre” is a slippery concept, and to say that certain texts are like this or like that, that all crime novels contain this or that element, is probably to oversimplify and overlook that diversity. Just look at the crime-fiction section in your local bookstore: Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Stieg Larsson, and a whole host of others. Different times, different settings. Different stories. Different readers. Different ways of writing. Different reasons for writing. 

That said, it’s important to think about why we have certain expectations, and how those expectations and counterexpectations affect the way we understand a text. For a student or someone new to a particular research field, adding a twist where the reader doesn’t expect one might mean the difference between being taken seriously or not, between passing or failing, between one career choice and another.

My paper’s not meant to be used prescriptively, as a how-to writing guide, but I do hope that the findings can be used by students, teachers, and researchers as part of a critical approach to academic literacies, as part of trying to understand how and why we read and write the way we do.

* If you can’t access the article at the Functions of Language website or via the DOI (it requires an institutional or personal subscription), let me know and I’ll be happy to send you a copy.

Note on the image accompanying this entry: detail of LEGO reenactment of Monty Python’s “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition,” from Know Your Meme (downloaded March 9, 2012).