That\u27s just the breaks : the ethics and representation in non-fiction writing

The dissertation shares the results of an ethnographic research that investigated the production of a memoir written by a former Peace Corps volunteer, who spent two years teaching in a small town in eastern Russia. In her memoir, the author used private information (including real names) gathered from the participants---native and non-native speakers---and published a book for a general public, predominantly English-speaking readers in the United States. The book is being successfully sold online and adds to the long list of published Peace Corps memoirs.;The purpose of the project was to examine the ethical issues involved in the production and reception of this non-fiction narrative that had transferred real events and people into the public area of communication, through the processes of writing and publishing the memoir. Subjects of the research included the author of the book, the Russian participants, and the researcher herself, since she had lived and worked in the place described in the book during the time of the author\u27s visit, knows the Russian participants, and participated in most of the events in the book. The research was guided by feminist methodology that included unstructured conversations with the participants, collaboration through the participants\u27 reviews of the research drafts, and inclusion of multiple voices through non-traditional discourses (auto-ethnography, parallel story-telling, and a rhetorically constructed conversation).;The study was conducted under the influence of the cultural and professional communication ethnographic research, and poststructuralist and post-colonial criticism. The research investigated issues of intellectual capitalist production and the problem of the Other in contemporary qualitative research. It challenged the ethos of the Peace Corps by establishing links between the genre of a Peace Corps memoir and exploitation of the Other, capitalist production, and exercise in Western power. Given the business tools and vocabulary that the genre of Peace Corps memoirs has been using (online resources for successful publishing, workshops, sales and profits, etc.), the researcher argues that Peace Corps writing is an example of entrepreneurship and a highly rhetorical enterprise

A contrastive study of the rhetorical organisation of English and Spanish PhD thesis introductions

This paper presents an analysis of the introductory sections of a corpus of 20 doctoral theses on computing written in Spanish and in English. Our aim was to ascertain whether the theses, produced within the same scientific-technological area but by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies to introduce the work presented. The analysis follows the Swalesian approach and is based on a move/step/sub-step model proposed for PhD introductions in Spanish (Carbonell-Olivares, Gil-Salom, & Soler-Monreal, 2009). The Spanish academic conventions appear to be that move 1 (M1- Establishing the Territory) and move 3 (M3- Occupying the Niche) are obligatory moves in PhD thesis introductions in Spanish, while move 2 (M2- Establishing the Niche) is optional. The structure of English thesis introductions reveals that they conform more closely to the M1-M2-M3 arrangement. Moreover, combinations of moves and patterns, cyclicity and embedding make their organisation more complex. The step analysis suggests that introductions in both languages rely mainly on the presentation of background information and the work carried out. However, the English introductions tend to stress the writer's own work, its originality and its contribution to the field of study. They also present more embedding and overlapping of steps and sub-steps than the Spanish texts. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.Soler Monreal, C.; Carbonell Olivares, MS.; Gil Salom, ML. (2011). A contrastive study of the rhetorical organisation of English and Spanish PhD thesis introductions. English for Specific Purposes. 30(1):4-17. doi:10.1016/j.esp.2010.04.005S41730