An intercultural approach to an embedded “bad news” genre

Abstract

Acknowledging the limitations of your own research is rhetorically challenging, and especially for those aiming to publish in a second language. This paper hypothesizes that a part of the challenge may be due to cross-cultural differences in the way these potentially self-damaging statements are rhetorically managed in RA discussion and/or other closing (DC) sections. Adopting an intercultural rhetoric approach, I drew two sub-samples of Limitations from two comparable corpora of social science RA DC sections across English and Spanish. I compared the rhetorical purposes of their surrounding segments from the lens of the “bad news” genre. The results showed that most authors prepared the reader for the Limitations, although the preferred stylistic strategies for doing so varied across the two publication contexts. Authors tended to exploit a similar set of rhetorical purposes, but in different ways to persuade readers about the acceptability of their study limitations. Specifically, in English it was conventional to “sandwich” the Limitations with good news, including implications for future practice, to mitigate their possible negative effect. In contrast, in Spanish it was conventional to surround them with explications to display the authors’ expertise, while the only salient mitigating strategy was their attribution to an external factor. These different rhetorical practices may be understood by divergent cultural (writing) styles, as well as differing authors’ understandings of impression management that were uncovered through email interviews. I advocate for a critical intercultural awareness approach to training scholars in writing skills necessary for research publication purposes in different languages.