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expository features, with little or no argumentation.
It is the narrative element that gives such texts a journalistic feel, withthe core of the text covering the questions of who, what, where and why, andoccasionally complemented by metatextual commentary.In contrast, purely academicgenres are typically rich in argumentation and practically devoid of narrativeelements (Swales, 1990).Within the textual framework of academic journalese, the purpose of this study
is to investigate what happens to Danish and Finnish writers’ English texts whenedited by native English-speaking editors for publication on the World Wide Web.Our aim is thus to trace and identify the types of changes to which a number oftexts have been subjected during the editing process in order to make them compatiblewith editorial requirements for the genre and standards of UK English.
This will be done by employing text linguistic, rhetorical and editorial concepts inthe analysis.The text linguistic concepts employed here cover the cohesive propertiesof texts, including ellipsis, repetition, reference and conjunction, which togetherhave an effect on the natural flow or rhythm of the text.We use the term rhetorical
to focus on the strategic aspect of language use.Thus, while text linguistic conceptsare adopted here to describe the qualities of text, we use rhetorical concepts to discusstext-external issues, such as the writer’s strategic choices.Finall y, we use the
term editorial to point to changes introduced by the editors, such as deletion or
insertion of an item.
342 H. Yli-Jokipii, P.E.F. Jorgensen / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 341–359
The incentive for this study materialised during our earlier intercultural investigation
into the rhetorical treatment of contextual issues in Danish and Finnish writers’
documents (Jorgensen & Yli-Jokipii, in press).During that research process,
we observed that there seems to be certain, previously undocumented variation in
how non-native writers and native editors code explicitness and tolerate implicitness
in the type of professional discourse investigated.
1.1. Research questions and hypotheses
We have posed the following two main questions for this genre study, each with
its own specific focus: (1) what types of changes are made by native editors to texts
written by non-native English writers? And (2) how do English texts written by
Finnish and Danish professionals differ from each other?
Each of these questions may be linked to a particular cultural hypothesis.The
first question allows for the hypothesis that editorial changes introduced by native
English editors increase the explicitness of a message rather than decrease it.The
changes are inserted to make the text conform to the expectations of readers with a
‘‘writer-responsible’’ (Hinds, 1987) cultural background who will be looking for
rhetorical markers of explicitness.
The cultural hypothesis underlying the second research question concerns the
variation between the Danish and Finnish unedited texts.The hypothesis is that
differences exist across our text corpus that can be attributed to the different native
language characteristics.Danish and English belong to the same Germanic group
of the Indo-European language family, whereas Finnish is a totally different,
Finno-Ugrian language deriving from non-Indo-European languages.In particular,
it is expected th