Reshaping academic writing in internationalised higher education: a contribution from contrastive rhetoric

Contemporary international academic writing experts, influenced by Anglophone academic writing norms, assert that ‘good’ writing requires conciseness, staying on track and sticking to the topic and its main points. Digressions tend to be seen as undermining a writer’s authority. Through the exploration of the ways in which academic writers formulate and structure textual relational propositions, this chapter aims to add to the knowledge pertaining to differences in the manner writers from culturally different academic discourse communities set and reach their communicative goals. Its purpose is to illustrate how the cultural conditioning of texts written by scholars of English and Polish language backgrounds is reflected in their rhetorical structure and differences in the levels of textual communicative balance and ways of making meaning. It is hoped that this study will contribute to multilingual English-as-additional-language (EAL) students’ and scholars’ awareness of their own rhetorical patterns, and the way they vary from the generally accepted structure of academic texts in Anglo-American settings, as well as help to familiarise English-dominant higher educators, academics and publication gatekeepers with other forms of text structure in order to assist in their evaluation and acceptance of work produced by EAL students and academics, and to help them perceive other styles of discourse patterns as different rather than unacceptable.