Of technical writing, instructions for use as a specialised genre and discourse communities

The texts associated with aircraft maintenance are fundamental in the maintenance process and in aircraft security. Aviation maintenance manuals ‒the core of this documentation‒ have to comply with regulations concerning content, format and expression. To ensure uniformity, manuals abide by a specification which regulates writing practices accommodating them to the controlled natural language ASD-STE100, a simplified version of English used as a standard in the industry. Through the qualitative analysis of a corpus of maintenance texts, this paper characterizes aviation instructions manuals as a genre by (i) illustrating the most relevant restrictions imposed by the specification and their implementation at the surface levels glossed in the specification and (ii) providing a description of the rhetorical macrostructure of instructional texts. The analysis reveals discrepancies between actual use and the rules which concern lexical, phrasal or sentential units; compliance with the rhetorical macrostructure seems to be the norm, however. As an explanation, it is hypothesized that deviations occur in areas where the specification clashes with standard technical writing practice, supporting thus the view that genres are mediated by social practices. Although further quantitative analysis is pending, this description of the use of ASD-STE100 might prove of interest both to scholars and practitioners.

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¿Idiolectos o tecnolectos? Resquicios de impronta personal en la descripción de procedimientos técnicos

Guinda¹

2023

Círc. lingüíst. apl. comun.

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¿Qué margen queda para la impronta personal en un texto tan constreñido y escueto como es la descripción de un procedimiento estándar en ingeniería? Este artículo examina las estrategias de los estudiantes de cuarto curso de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid para construir su propio ethos académico y comunicar una impresión de credibilidad y confianza. El escrutinio de un corpus electrónico de más de 300 muestras de autoría individual y 76 de escritura colaborativa, todas ellas redactadas en lengua inglesa y en el marco de la asignatura obligatoria English for Professional and Academic Communication, revela que estos escritores inexpertos se posicionan en cuanto al mensaje y a su audiencia trasgrediendo convenciones formales, recurriendo a expresiones de subjetividad (mitigadores, enfatizadores y marcadores de actitud), adoptando un mayor o menor grado de deferencia metadiscursiva hacia el lector y graduando las distancias espaciotemporal y modal.

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Of technical writing, instructions for use as a specialised genre and discourse communities

Abstract: rédaction technique, des modes d'emploi en tant que genre spécialisé et des communautés discursives

Cited by 3 publications

References 11 publications

Language as the tip of the iceberg? Shedding a critical light on ‘hidden’ discourse in digital platforms

Language as the tip of the iceberg? Shedding a critical light on ‘hidden’ discourse in digital platforms

Characterizing aviation maintenance manuals written in the controlled language ASD-STE100 as a genre: a corpus analysis

¿Idiolectos o tecnolectos? Resquicios de impronta personal en la descripción de procedimientos técnicos

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