ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the potential of LSP corpora as a resource for technical writing. Most of you, whether as a student, teacher or professional, will be required at some stage in your lives to write in different styles for different occasions. You may need to learn how to write business letters, how to present an annual report, how to write up a scientific experiment, how to write a product review. In other words, you may need to learn how to produce different text types. We believe that small specialized corpora containing texts of a particular style can be a useful resource when you are learning to write in a particular style or produce a particular text type. In this chapter, we will take a couple of small corpora, each representative of different writing styles, and we will show you how to exploit them. The first corpus we will examine contains articles from a scientific journal, while the second contains reviews of computer hardware. You may be interested in very different types of texts from those under discussion in this chapter, but you should be able to apply the same type of methodology to the text type that interests you.
