Perceiving Genre with Special Reference to the Academic Writing

This study uses innovative computational rhetorical analysis tools to investigate the use of citations in a corpus of academic articles. As a result of genre theory, our study uses graph-theoretic diagrams to extract and amplify expected patterns of repeated moves that are linked with stable academic writing genres. There is evidence to suggest that our computational strategy is as good as qualitative researchers who code by hand, such as Karatsolis and colleagues, in properly detecting and classifying citation movements (this issue). Pairwise comparisons of advisor and advisee texts reveal further applications for automated computational analysis as formative feedback in a mentoring scenario.