Predicting the success of literary works is a curious question among publishers and aspiring writers alike. We examine the quantitative connection, if any, between writing style and successful literature. Based on novels over several different genres, we probe the predictive power of statistical stylometry in discriminating successful literary works, and identify characteristic stylistic elemen...

The expression of doubt and certainty is crucial in academic writing where the authors have to distinguish opinion from fact and evaluate their assertions in acceptable and persuasive ways. Hedges and boosters are two strategies used for this purpose. Despite their importance in academic writing, we know little about how they are used in different disciplines and genres and how foreign language...

This article surveys published narratives about surfing and sharks in Australia over the past century, mapping representations across various genres forms of writing. These include works non-fiction (including for younger readers), memoir, travel writing, humour other long-form creative nonfiction. writing has been analysed using thematic analysis to provide an Anthropocene-informed reading cha...

Scientific writing is a general label with a great deal of variation at any period. Empirical evidence of variation within genres of the early periods has been produced by studies of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, as they have shown that umbrella categories like ‘religious treatises’ or ‘scientific writing’ contain very heterogeneous texts (Meurman-Solin 1993, Taavitsainen 1993, 1994a). ...

The results of a computational analysis of all predications, finite and non-finite, in a one-million-word corpus of present-day American English (the "Brown Corpus") are presented. The analysis shows the nature of the syntactic differences among the various genres of writing represented in the data base, especially between informative prose and imaginative prose. The results also demonstrate th...

We describe a novel method for measuring affective language in historical texts by expanding an affective lexicon and jointly adapting it to prior language stages. We automatically construct a lexicon for word-emotion association of 18th and 19th century German which is then validated against expert ratings. Subsequently, this resource is used to identify distinct emotional patterns and trace l...

In the ESP tradition, genre is often defined as “structured communicative events engaged in by specific discourse communities whose members share broad communicative purposes.” ESP genre research has generated numerous descriptions and explanations of discipline-specific genre exemplars and has produced various pedagogical proposals. However, what learners learn from these genre descriptions an...

In Malaysian universities, writing in English is taught several settings: for general purposes, academic purposes and specific purposes. Writing these settings allows learners to learn write different genres, such as research, reports, persuasive genres. One of the standard genres because it used convince readers what researched or reported. To be competent persuading arguing, using appropriate...

Utopia and satire would seem, superficially at least, to be closely related genres. They both reject present forms of human society, and they sometimes make use of similar devices (e. g., the voyage, the stranger's eye). They would seem to differ only in emphasis. Whereas the satirist focuses on criticism, the utopian writer offers an ideal alternative. The implicit social censure embedded in u...