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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 34:2 (2021) ► pp.671–711

Authoring support for Spanish language writers

A genre-restricted case study

ORCID logo | University of León
ORCID logo | University of Valladolid
ORCID logo | University of Deusto
Authoring support consists of (semi)automated aids to be used at different stages during the writing process. Language information, however, tends to be restricted to areas such as spelling and grammar checking or term banks, and text construction difficulties that writers face concerning the structure of particular genres, associated sentence formulations or genre-specific vocabulary have not received proper attention. An additional gap in the research is that this support is generally addressed to English language users. This paper addresses these concerns focusing on a particular genre: the company’s directors’ report, and on Spanish language writers writing in English. A custom-made monolingual corpus has been analyzed using Bhatia (1993, 2004) and Swales (1990, 2004) definitions of genre and move combined with theme characterization. Recurrent strings for each move/step, which are conventionally associated with each rhetorical unit, were identified and formulated as “meta-strings.” The bilingual glossary includes domain-specific items as well as move/step or genre-specific lexical and phraseological options, i.e., elements used irrespective of the business, places or people involved. The results are valuable by themselves, as an analysis of the genre, but also as the empirical basis for the authoring support tool that we present here, and as language training materials.
Keywords: authoring support, corpus linguistics, genre analysis, move structure, directors’ report
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The case study: The genre Directors’ Report
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Annotation: Moves and steps
  • 4.Move structure and rhetorical database
    • 4.1Obligatory moves
    • 4.2Expected moves
    • 4.3Optional moves
  • 5.The glossary database
  • 6.The “meta-string” database
  • 7.Authoring support
    • 7.1Using the tool
  • 8.Conclusions and further work
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.19048.rab
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