Genre awareness in professional and academic language: the importance of “packing” knowledge appropriately in professional settings and academia

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide insights on the importance of genre awareness in the study, correct understanding and accurate use of Professional and Academic Language (PAL), with special emphasis being placed on the language of industrial ceramics and that used in academia. First of all, the concept of PAL as the big “container” of specialised languages is put forward and linked with the notion of genre as a communicative event characterised by its recurrent, dynamic, recognisable, expectable and conventionalised nature and by the communicative purpose it aims to achieve. Such a description attempts to show how the correct understanding and use of PAL goes beyond merely terminological considerations and in fact needs genre so that it can be “packed” appropriately for the audience. Thus, the importance of genre in PAL is analysed from two main points of view: firstly, by focusing on its more professional aspects (dealing with the relevance of generic balance in corpus compilation and of genre awareness in general in discourse communities) and, secondly, by focusing on the importance of observing generic conventions (even “constraints”) in academia. Additionally, digital genres are also analysed as an increasingly significant way of packaging information, all this leading to the conclusion that genre awareness necessarily implies accomplishing the expectations and conventionalised use of language (both general or professional and academic) established by discourse communities