ABSTRACT
People – their teachers, their colleagues, their bosses – expect them to read so that they can keep up professionally. And, ultimately, these same people are quite likely to tell them that their career will be advanced by writing as well as reading. There are a great many courses in contemporary clinical education on ‘critical appraisal’, ‘how to read a paper’, ‘writing for publication’, and so on. The fact that academic writing is indeed a rule-governed activity, as are other aspects of clinical communication, of course, is one of these strands. Teaching how to write in a genre such as the ‘academic article’ is therefore concerned with making people aware of the general principle of language as being rule or tendency governed, and of making them more conscious both of what the rules are, and of how to follow them.
