Novice and expert writing in the medical sciences: report of a program of language assistance for a PhD medical student

This paper reports findings from a program of language assistance for a PhD medical student. The program took the form of a comparative study of the student's draft of a research article, and her supervisor's rewrite of it. The linguistic framework for the analysis was based on the "functional grammar" of Halliday (1985) and the move analysis of Swales (1981). Observed differences in the transitivity and thematic structure in the two texts suggested a greater level of self-consciousness on the part of the student in the research process. The value of this comparative approach, both as a tool for genre analysis and as a pedagogical method, is considered at the end of the paper.