A Discourse Analysis of Manuals of Style: the Specification of Function and Structure For Composition of Research Article Titles

Whereas globalization has wreaked havoc on many fields, it has largely been apositive force in the area of information dissemination and written communication.inclusion of new writers and a better understanding of research writing haveresulted. many new members of academic discourse communities have turned tomanuals of style for support and assistance. a thematic and corpus analysis wascompleted on the title composition sections of 15 manuals of style to determine theextent to which they have incorporated findings from genre analysis, english forspecific purposes, and related fields. the findings suggest that manuals of stylecontain little discussion of the function and structure of titles, a dominant point inrecent theory and research about titles. terms such as nominal group andnominalization are unused. instead manuals of style emphasize keywords, an olderperspective on title composition. this finding suggests that manuals of style are notincorporating recent research on writing.