Purpose and identity in professional and student radiology writing : a genre based approach

Abstract

This thesis examines the way in which purpose and identity are realised in the written case reports of radiography students in comparison with those of professional writers. Students entering a new discourse community have to take on a new social identity and this identity is expressed by means of familiarity with the appropriate discourse conventions, including genre as the most overt expression of rhetorical purpose. Also important are the pragmatic choices used by writers to guide readers’ understanding of text and to construct interaction between them, i.e. metadiscourse, which here provides an additional and complementary way of viewing purpose and identity. The study aims, at a more theoretical level, to make a contribution to writing research by integrating genre analysis and metadiscourse analysis within a single framework to provide new insight into the resources available to writers to construe identity in text. At a descriptive level, it provides analyses of a hitherto neglected genre of medical writing. Because the study compares the writing of novices and professionals, the description of this genre makes findings available for pedagogical application. Radiographers and radiologists work as members of the same professional teams and both publish case reports, often in the same journals. Data for the study is provided by two corpora of reports, one produced by radiography students and the other published in national journals by professionals. The genre analysis establishes the move structure of the radiological case study for both corpora and a cross-corpus analysis of metadiscourse demonstrates how identity is realised in the text as the moves unfold. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted with regard to the data. The student reports appear to be examples of a sub-genre of case reports with the move structure and metadiscoursal strategies differing in several significant ways, reflecting the different purposes and identities of the writers. Student writers are found not to be concerned with the more persuasive rhetorical functions of the genre and tend to align themselves with the viewpoint of the patient rather than the medical profession, drawing on school essay discourse and making use of metadiscoursal strategies associated with textbooks.