Gustavo MENDILUCE CABRERA
Ana Isabel HERNÁNDEZ BARTOLOMÉ
Universidad de Valladolid
gustavom@ibyte.uva.es

 

moving towards english introductions in biomedicine

 

The purpose of our paper is to compare how certain rhetorical features vary in English and Spanish scientific articles in order to help Spanish medical authors improve their acceptance rates in international English-language journals.

Our starting point is that science can be defined as a rational explanation of reality that aims to discover the truth. Yet, a certain degree of subjectivity is always present in scientific methodology. Contradictory as it may seem, scientific truth is never definitive and universal. This is so because science, being an explanation, needs to be interpretative and evaluative. This paradoxical view of science has been extensively proved by several important papers, mainly from two approaches, namely, the sociology of science and the rhetoric of science.

Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Gilbert & Mulkay (1984) are two examples of research done in the field of the sociological study of scientific discourse. Both works seem to indicate that the scientific article is not a mere reflection of what happened in the laboratory, but a “highly-revised” complex textual artifact that tells the story not in chronological order, but according to other conventions. In his Rhetoric of Science (1996), Alan G. Gross, perhaps the best-known scholar in the rhetoric of science, has argued that rhetoric ?understood as persuasion? is the cornerstone of scientific discourse. More recently (2002), to prove this persuasive view, he has examined the history of the scientific article in terms of the Darwinian evolution theory of species.

From a more linguistic perspective, John Swales developed (1984) and improved (1990) a move-based model to explain the rhetorical structure of the research article. As a pioneer in the genre-based studies, he defined the research article in a sociorhetorical framework as a genre built according to certain conventions imposed by a discourse community. Discourse communities, as contrastive rhetoric has shown, vary across languages and cultures, even within languages for specific purposes, like scientific and biomedical writing. This has been exemplified by recent publications for non-native users of English, especially manuals devoted to the teaching of specialized writing skills. One of the best instances in Spain is the book Cómo escribir un artículo de investigación en inglés (2002). Actually, we will follow the move-based approach of this manual in order to establish our rhetorical analysis of biomedical research articles.

More particularly, we will focus on the Introduction of the biomedical paper, one of the most difficult sections to write (Swales & Feak 1994). We will select several biomedical articles and classify these texts into three corpora, according to the authors' language and nativeness: i) those written in English by native authors; ii) those written in Spanish by native authors; and iii) those written in English by Spanish authors. Thus, we will examine the rhetorical moves of each group to study the linguistic variation across the three corpora and determine if there is a negative transfer from L1 to L2 writing. Pointed out as a highly problematic function for native writers, bridging the gap is even more difficult to master for non-native writers, as it requires the combination of two complex skills: i) the negotiation of academic knowledge by using a harmonious proportion of hedges and boosters (Hyland 1998), and ii) signaling the limitations of the previous biomedical research to justify the necessity of the current paper by using contrastive markers (Piqué Angordans 2002). Hence, our paper will explore exhaustively this area of difficulty, especially in terms of hedges, boosters and contrastive markers.

Therefore, our aim is to help Spanish health sciences professionals to improve their writing in English by trying to mimic native rhetorical patterns in the Introduction of their articles submitted to high impact factor biomedical journals.