Navigating Academia: Writing Supporting Genres (Volume 4)

by John M. Swales, Christine Feak

Navigating Academia is a bit different from the other volumes in the series because it focuses on the supporting genres that facilitate the more public genres that form the building blocks of an academic and/or research career. Included are statements of purpose for graduate school applications, letters of recommendation, and responses to journal reviewers. One feature that these genres have in common is that they are largely hidden from public view; it is difficult to find examples of them in university libraries. Although guidance about these genres can increasingly be found on the Internet, this guidance is often too general to be helpful in an individual particular situation. This is unfortunate because in almost all cases, the individual needs to be seen as both a serious scholar, researcher, or instructor (whether beginning or getting established) and as a collegial but objective person. As a result, many of these academic communications need to be carefully considered, particularly with regard to the likely effect this communication will have on its intended recipients, who, more often than not, are established figures in the field (as with a job application letter). Because of the roles of these genres, this volume also differs somewhat from the others in that it is as much concerned with social academic practice as it is with more formal academic texts. This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on academic correspondence  that appeared in English in Today's Research World .

120 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2011

About the author

John Malcolm Swales was an English linguist. He joined the University of Michigan as a faculty member in 1985. He retired in 2006 as professor emeritus of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English project.
Swales was best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science. His writing has studied second language acquisition.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this was the least effective of the four volumes in this series. Perhaps this has to do with the wide swath of genres it attempts to cover: personal statements, recommendation letters, responses to journal reviewers, etc. Indeed, the authors themselves acknowledge that the only thing that really connects the topics are that nearly all of them are "hidden from the public view." That being said, this book didn't provide nearly enough examples of such (otherwise hidden) documents to give readers examples to imitate and compare. And, while I sympathize with the difficulty of attempting to render advice across disciplines, the discrepancies might have been addressed by actually providing disparate examples from which writers could glean their own disciplinary generalizations.

[Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personally, though it was pleasant to see some of these hidden genres, this book had content which wasn’t as helpful for me when compared to genres from Academic Writing for Graduate Students. It felt a bit flimsy, with not as many examples as I was expecting after reading AWGS. Again, this could be an audience thing and the fact that I’m a native English speaker, but many of the language focus sections I skipped after realizing I already employ these particular strategies, and some sections were not genres I worry about (emails, statements of purpose, etc). The parts about publishing were the most helpful, and I did like some of the tasks with the CV section, but overall this part of the series (the first of the four I read, despite it being technically last in the authors’ order) was a quick read that was not as beneficial compared to other works in a similar vein from these two scholars.

[X · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is more of a textbook than reading materials. It contains a lot of exercises but not enough discussions and advices.