Keyness in academic textbook blurbs: Lexical variations across disciplines

Wenhsien Yang
National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism

Abstract

Evaluative genres tend to prevail in academic texts and their purposes are always
dual-focused, namely, informing and promoting. Hence, rhetorical devices employed in
evaluative genres are always elaborately arranged to achieve their communicative purposes.
The present corpus-driven research attempts to use university academic textbook blurbs to
unveil the embedded norms and values of their readership and the discourse community
across various science disciplines. A total of 80 texts, selected from eight disciplines and
classed as either hard or soft sciences, were collected and treated as the main study corpus.
The keywords of the corpus indicate that the lexical choices employed in the diverse sciences
represent their differentiated assumptions of epistemology and ontology. The study also
provides pedagogical implications for EFL writing, and indicates areas of interest and future
areas of investigation.

Keywords: genre analysis, keyword analysis, book blurbs, evaluation genres, disciplinary
variations

Introduction
As Hyland states, among all activities of the academy, what academics mainly do is
evaluate (Hyland & Diani, 2009: 1); thus, evaluative language is commonly seen across
various academic text genres. The purpose of evaluating is usually accompanied with another
purpose, i.e. promotion. In open genres, texts such as research articles either implicitly or
explicitly convey the communicative purposes of promoting or evaluating self work or
previous literature. In occluded genres with limited accessibility, texts such as proposals for
grants or personal statements are also heavily embedded with promotional and evaluative
purposes by delicately elaborating linguistic devices within the texts. Much research on
analysing evaluating academic texts in both open and occluded genres has already been
carried out by analysts. However, lately, researchers focus on genre analysis has shifted to
attend to the genres which distribute the knowledge, in particular, carrier genres. Back-cover
blurbs (Gea-Valor & Inigo-Ros, 2009; Gesuato, 2007), publishers descriptions (Giannoni,
2009), book reviews (Nodoushan & Montazeran, 2012) and journal descriptions (Hyland &
Tse, 2009, 2010) all fall into this category. The importance of these so-called carrier genres
lies in the fact that they play an indispensable role in the mechanisms of delivering and
promoting authors/editors expectations to their potential readers or contributors (Giannoni,
2009), and in staking out a specific territory which it can then claim to uniquely occupy
(Hyland & Tse, 2010: 22).
Yet, it is book blurbs, one of the evaluative genres with obvious purposes of promoting
products and persuading prospective readers to buy books (Bhatia, 2004; Kathpalia, 1997;
Gea-Valor, 2005), that have received relatively more attention compared to the others, as book
publishing is a large and competitive industry (Gea-Valor & Inigo-Ros, 2009). Often, genre
analysts would attempt to identify the generic structures and linguistic features used to realise
the purposes of evaluating and promoting in book descriptions across various kinds of books.
Nevertheless, analysing the book blurbs of academic textbooks used by university students is
rather understudied. It is assumed that book blurbs used to promote these academic textbooks

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 might be very different from those used in fictional, literary, or highly scholastic academic
books, as the users of academic textbooks are finite and predictable, and this diversification of
the targeted audience can greatly affect the rhetorical structure and linguistic realisations of
book blurbs (Gea-Valor & Inigo-Ros, 2009). Academic textbooks are probably the most
common genre that university students encounter, and they are the main source providing
students with the concepts and analytical methods in the disciplines they are engaged in
(Hyland, 1999). Besides, the number of users of academic textbooks may be larger than that
of any other academic teacher-targeted books or journals. The huge profits mean the
publishers have to devote great effort and strategies to publicising these textbooks. Therefore,
very likely the advertising expressed in the evaluating and promoting language would be more
obvious and eye-catching. The present study thus attempts to bridge the gap in the current
knowledge by analysing the keywords used in academic textbooks to identify any differences
in the values and norms across disciplinary variations.

Literature review
Several studies have attempted to identify the move structure of book blurbs. For example,
Gea-Valor (2005) proposes three moves, namely, description, evaluation and about the author.
In order to achieve its promotional purposes, they would employ a wide range of linguistic
elements and conventions such as complimenting, elliptical syntactic patterns, the imperative,
the address form you and the curiosity arouser. On the other hand, Cacchiani (2007) identified
a 4-move structure, namely, identification, establishing credentials, highlighting parts of the
book, and appraising the book. The author concludes that the book blurbs selectively present
the positive features of books in highly positive terms. In other words, negative terms are
seldom found. Gea-Valor (2006) in another study researched the features of book blurbs
publicised on the Internet. The study found that the digital features such as visual effects are
gradually shaping the structure and rhetoric of traditional printed book blurbs. They contain
many innovative and resourceful characteristics including international scope, interactivity,
non-linearity and bidirectional communication.
Differing from the previous research, Marciulioniene (2012) studied book blurbs in fiction
from a diachronic perspective. In addition to the identification of its 4-move structure, the
study reveals that unique and rare words, in particular, adjectives, in the book blurbs are still
very stable across time differences. Similarly, Gesuato (2007) also found that there were
relatively few variations of language use in book blurbs across four academic disciplines
(biology, engineering, education and linguistics). By using the same diachronic method,
Gea-Valor and Inigo-Ros (2009) also examined 100 book blurbs published by one publisher,
Penguin, from the late 1940s until the present. They identified a 5-move structure of the book
blurbs of classics, namely, catchphrase, description, appraisal, authors credentials and
technical information, and found that the tendency of merging both descriptive and evaluative
language is frequent across time. However, in contrast to the previous two studies, they also
argue that book blurbs do change, such as in their employment of elliptical structures in order
to reveal the influence of marketing and the need to be competitive in a fast-moving world
(p.217).
Kathpalia (1997) examined the book blurbs from a cross-cultural perspective by comparing
those printed by international and local publishers. The study argues that socio-cultural factors,
especially the pragmatic value in a specific professional-business context, would affect how a
genre is constructed and its success in various environments. Basturkmen (2009) compared
book blurbs in EFL textbooks published in New Zealand, and claimed that they can serve as a
window on cultural values as they contain value-laden assumptions about how disciplines
should be approached at a specific time. The words chosen in book blurbs suggest and reflect
how language should be taught and learnt in a specific discipline at a specific time in a

64
specific country.
Hence, though there may be conventional clause and syntactic patterns to follow in traditional
book blurbs, this genre is also becoming hybrid and fluid as a number of factors such as
culture, discipline, diachrony or medium would affect how they should be constructed in
terms of their move structures and linguistic realisations. In addition, recent studies on genre
texts have placed increasing emphasis on the variations of disciplinary culture, which further
determines what is the acceptable argument or organisation in respective disciplines (Hyland
& Bondi, 2006). In academic lexis, research also shows that different disciplines tend to use
it in slightly different ways, on the basis of their methodological tenets (Bondi, 2010: 8).
That is, specialist vocabularies used in disciplinary texts represent their individual epistemic
conventions, and ways of constructing, formulating, negotiating and disseminating knowledge
(Malavasi & Mazzi, 2010).
Keyword analysis, a qualitative concordance analysis with the help of computational tools,
can help identify the significance (or key) of lexis in a set of texts (Groom, 2009). Analysing
keywords in a given set of disciplinary texts has recently become of interest in studying the
evaluative features of discourse (Martin & White, 2005) as they are closely associated with
the cultures, assumptions, and value systems of argumentative practice in academic
disciplines (Bondi, 2010). They not only are often regarded as useful indicators of the
characteristic style of a particular text or corpus (Groom, 2010: 59) but often provide a way
of identifying which words best distinguish the texts of a particular author or group of authors
from another (Hyland, 2012: 68). Furthermore, the keyness1 in keywords also indicates the
texts aboutness2 and style. Keyness is text-dependent and can represent a quality in a given
set of texts or in given cultures (Scott, 2010).
Yet, other than Gesuatos (2007) study, there has been little research on book blurbs
addressing the keyword variations across hard and soft disciplines; besides, keyness is still
little understood, and much exploratory work needs to be done (Scott, 2010). Thus, differing
from most of the previous studies identifying the move structures of book blurbs, the present
study attempts to research this genre from a less-exploited perspective, that is, to investigate
the keywords used in book blurbs of academic textbooks across disciplines and to explain any
differences between the soft and hard science areas in terms of disciplinary values or cultures.

Research questions
To be specific, the present study aims to research the following three questions:
1. What are the keywords used to evaluate academic textbooks?
What are the variations of keywords use to represent the ontological or epistemological values
across different disciplines?
3. How are the relationships between book blurbs authors and readers positioned in terms
of using the authorial subjects?

Methodology

Texts and corpus

In the present study, the texts were collected from the best-selling academic textbooks in
America3 in 2012. They were classed as two major categories, namely, the soft sciences
including business management (BSM), education (EDU), legal studies (LLS) and linguistics

1
Keyness is defined as a quality words may have in a given text or set of texts, suggesting they are important,
they reflect what the text is really about, avoiding trivia and insignificant detail (Scott & Tribble, 2006).
2
Aboutness refers to what a keyword can talk about in its particular genre i.e. what do these keywords mean in a
targeted situation (Scott & Tribble, 2006).
3
The list of the best-selling academic books comes from the website www.textbooks.com.

65
 (LIG), and the hard sciences including the agriculture and life science (ALS), computer
science (CMS), electronic engineering (EEG) and medical science (MED) disciplines. In each
discipline, 10 blurbs were selected, giving a total of 80 texts and 15,884 tokens to serve as the
main study corpus for this research. The British National Corpus (BNC), which consists of
100 million English words, was used as the reference corpus in order to generate keywords
from the study corpus.

Analysis
With the help of the concordance software, WordSmith 5.0 (Scott, 2008), six lists were
generated, namely three frequency wordlists including an All disciplines, a Soft sciences
and a Hard sciences list, and three keyword lists including an All disciplines, a Soft
sciences and a Hard sciences lists. Keyword lists were created by using the present corpus
as the main/study corpus and BNC as the referred corpus. The keywords in each list were
classed into two categories: overused and underused keywords. It is the overused keywords
that represent the keyness of the texts as they have relatively unusually high frequencies
compared to the referred frequencies in BNC. The total keywords (overused: underused) of
the three lists are as follows: all sciences (272: 19), soft sciences (137: 3), and hard sciences
(190: 8). Table 1 partially displays the top 20 overused keywords together with a number of
underused keywords in the three keyword lists. The higher ranking a word has, the higher
keyness it has. Hence, the word edition has the highest keyness among all three keyword
lists; however, the second word with the highest keyness varies across disciplines.
Next, in order to compare the promotional lexis used by different disciplines, each keyword
list was further reduced to retain verbs, adjectives and adverbs only. Besides, the function of
concordancing in WordSmith was executed to identify how the authorial subjects were
employed to represent authorship in different sciences. The following sections discuss these
findings.

Table 1: Top 20 keywords with reference to BNC

All disciplines Soft sciences Hard Sciences
Overused keywords
1 EDITION EDITION EDITION
2 BOOK LANGUAGE PHOTOSHOP
3 PHOTOSHOP ANTITRUST LIGHTROOM
4 NEW AND BOOK
5 AND BOOK NEW
6 LIGHTROOM UNDERSTANDING CHAPTERS
7 TOPICS ENTREPRENEURIAL COLOR
8 TEXT TEXT ONLINE
9 TEXTBOOK LINGUISTICS ADOBE
10 CHAPTERS STUDENTS CHAPTER
11 STUDENTS DISORDERS TOPICS
12 LANGUAGE PROVIDES TEXTBOOK
13 ANTITRUST TEACHING TRANSGENIC
14 ONLINE LAW EXPERTCONSULT

66
15 COLOR EU UPDATES
16 ADOBE MINDSET COVERAGE
17 UNDERSTANDING TOPICS AND
18 PROVIDES EXAMPLES ALGORITHMS
19 UPDATES CONVEYANCING DIGITAL
20 CHAPTER CONCEPTS TEXT
Underused keywords
1 OUT BE WERE
2 WHICH HIS IT
3 WHEN YOU THERE
4 THAT HIS
5 NO BE
6 THEY NOT
7 IT BUT
8 WE HE
9 WOULD
10 IF
11 THERE
12 WERE
13 NOT
14 BUT
15 HIS
16 BE
17 HER
18 HE
19 WAS
Note: Words are ranked from the highest to the lowest keyness in both the overused and
underused categories

Results and discussion

Overused keywords across disciplines

In terms of overused keywords, the soft and hard disciplines show their various preferences in
addition to both sharing common vocabulary. As Table 2 exhibits, the words edition, and, text,
understanding, website, chapters, introductory, practical, and principles are the top keywords
in both science areas. These words represent not only the features of what academic textbooks
should have, such as edition, introductory, principles, or understanding, but also shed light on
the new directions they have taken. The words related to the current digital era such as
website or online explain the new features of current textbooks; these technological adds-on
or applications are also used to persuade young users that their products are closely connected
to the Internet and accordingly arouse their interest in purchasing the books. In addition, the
conjunction and is employed excessively in binary phrases across the texts, which serves the

67
 purpose of accumulating the benefits the book can offer, and intensifies the motivation to
purchase. Indeed, the word and is commonly used in promotional genres such as personal
statements to introduce or manifest the positive self (Ding, 2007; Henry & Roseberry, 2001).
In disciplinary variations, it is found that the words students, teachers, and, mindset, provides,
examples, concepts, analysis, learning, practice, comprehensive and accessible have
relatively higher keyness in the soft sciences, while the words new, colour, online, updates,
expertconsult (expert consult), digital, coverage, latest, searchable, step, and reference have
higher keyness in the hard sciences. These differences can clearly represent the different
values and norms in the two science areas. For instance, the word colour is a key in the hard
disciplines, especially in medical science textbooks, as the use of many different colours helps
to precisely position the tissues, organs, or muscles in body systems. Furthermore, apparently,
pursuing the latest knowledge is what most hard disciplines aim for. Hence, the words updates,
latest, and new all have high keyness in the hard sciences but not in the soft sciences. The
word expertconsult also highlights the importance of accumulating knowledge from the field
experts in hard science; in other words, it implies that acknowledging the professional
hierarchy plays a crucial role in this knowledge area. The hard sciences also place much value
on procedures and cumulative knowledge (Becher, 1989); therefore, the words step and
reference are also keywords.
However, in the soft sciences the values are different; human interaction is highly emphasised.
Thus, teachers, learning and students have high keyness to display the vital roles both parties
play in teaching and learning activities. Besides, in their teaching values and methods, the soft
sciences do not usually rely on following a single authority; rather, the
understanding/comprehensibility and diversity of knowledge is encouraged and accepted
(Becher, 1989; Groom, 2009; Hyland, 2000). Thus, the words concepts, examples,
comprehensive, analysis, mindset, and practice become high keywords in soft science.

Underused keywords across disciplines

The underused keywords can also exhibit a number of features in book blurbs. Complex
sentences are rarely used as they may be less direct and difficult to comprehend. Thus, the
relative pronouns which and that are relatively underused. Presumably, promotional language
can be more powerful when using the conjunction and to form compound sentences, which
conveys an image of intensifying benefits accumulatively. In addition, both science areas also
make minimal use of the personal pronouns we, you and he. This usage signals that the
authors of book blurbs prefer to be unidentifiable to avoid making the promotion too
subjective.
Yet, variations of underused keywords also exist across the two areas. The personal
pronoun you is underused in soft science but not in hard science. This implies that the hard
sciences tend to display their authoritative voice when referring to readers, which is not the
case in the soft sciences. Apparently, negative language is unacceptable as no publishers
would allow negative or equivocal words in book blurbs when they are promoting their books
(Cronin & La Barre, 2005); thus, those words with negative connotations such as but and not
certainly become underused keywords. However, these two words are much more obviously
underused in the hard than in the soft disciplines. This implies that negative language is
purposefully avoided in the hard sciences, which might make blurbs become exaggerated in
promoting books. Relatively, these two words are not underused in the soft sciences; in other
words, they are employed with similar frequency to daily usage. This might make their
promotional purposes less strong and thus make the blurbs more reliable.
Another interesting finding is that hedges or modal verbs such as would, might, may and
could are not keywords in the present corpus. Yet, according to Hyland (1998) and Hyland
and Diani (2009), these words are prevalent in evaluative genres as they have both an

68
epistemic and an affective function in that they tone down criticism and reflect a positive
relationship between readers and authors. The employment of hedges or modal verbs can
render the interpersonal damage of critical comments, which is fairly significant in the review
genre, one of the evaluative genres. However, this usage is extraordinarily uncommon in the
present study. Moreover, one modal verb, would, is an underused keyword in the corpus,
which signifies that it is used relatively less compared to its frequency in daily usage. One
possible reason could be that in academic textbook blurbs the relationship between book
authors and readers is positioned as field experts and learners, which apparently represents a
scholastic hierarchy in academia. Hence, unlike other evaluative genres or book blurbs where
readers and authors may equally enjoy a similar status, writers of textbook blurbs seemingly
have no concern of risking interpersonal relationships. Instead, expressing the hierarchy
clearly can help establish the credentials of the book authors and thus purposefully construct
an authoritative image for the academic textbook.
Authorial subjects
In terms of the authorial subjects used to mention self or others, Table 2 shows the differences
between the two science areas.

Table 2: Frequency of the authorial subjects in disciplines

I You Author He She Students
Soft 1 11 1 2 1 32
Hard 1 77 2 7 0 29

I is the least used word in both areas but is used to refer to the book blurb author in the
soft sciences, whereas it is used to replicate the title of one chapter in the hard sciences.
Though the frequency difference between the two areas is not significant, the avoidance of the
use of I to self-mention authors is still preferred in the hard sciences. As with its usage in
academic articles, downplaying the personal role as the authorial subject not only highlights
the book s/he is promoting, but also strengthens the objectivity of statements (Hyland, 2012).
However, in total, there are nine occurrences (including I, author and he) of mentioning the
book authors in the hard sciences compared with only four (including author, he and she) in
the soft sciences. This usage corresponds to the previous discussion in that the fame and
expertise of the authors are highly valued in the hard sciences and are therefore more
frequently referred to.
Another major difference is the usage of you. As discussed earlier, to represent an
authoritative voice, you will be directly used to refer to readers, which explains its higher
frequency in the hard sciences. Hence, you is always used as the subject in the beginning of
sentences like so you, you need, or you can. However, in the soft sciences, you is often
used as an object after verbs like show you, save you, offer you, or tell you.
The voice here is less direct and thus places the readers as the beneficiaries of buying the
book rather than as doers following orders (or recommendations). These differences suggest
the diversity of how the authors of book blurbs position their relationship with readers in the
two science areas.

Implications and conclusions

Pedagogical implications
As discussed in the opening section, evaluation exists across many academic activities
(Hyland & Diani, 2009) and the genre of consumer advertising such as book blurbs has been
colonising professional and public orders of discourse on a massive scale (Fairclough, 1995:
139). Thus, how to strategically employ evaluative language in order to promote self is

69
 crucially important not only for book publishers or advertising companies but also for
discourse or genre analysts. However, the present study argues that in addition to academic
professionals, undergraduates or postgraduates should be aware of evaluative genres and
should be explicitly taught how to compose promotional and persuasive texts by selecting
appropriate lexis, as they may also encounter many situations in which they need to evaluate
texts or promote themselves in their study life. For example, undergraduates need to write
personal statements in order to apply for graduate studies, and postgraduates have to write
grant proposals, job application letters or literature reviews in academic papers in order to
complete their studies successfully. Hence, being aware of how evaluative language can be
strategically used to promote self is also essential to students.
Genre or keyword analysis in a given set of texts is recommended to EFL teachers in writing
classrooms as it assists writers in identifying the conventional structure and linguistic
elements used in a specific genre, which helps the writing texts achieve their communicative
purposes. On the one hand, EFL writing teachers should train student writers to become
ethnographers. Writers should investigate the texts they are going to write by considering the
following macro-level issues: the social and cultural context of a genre, i.e. its setting, the
purpose and the content of the genre, the authors role, the intended audience, the
relationships between writers and audience, audiences expectations, shared understandings,
and assumed background knowledge. Furthermore, they should also study the texts from a
micro-level, which includes its tone, typical discourse-level, grammatical features, and lexical
choices (Paltridge, 2001). The answers to the above questions can be collected by conducting
interviews, observations or sample analysis, and this type of coaching can be applied to all the
other genre texts. In other words, students should be trained to discover what their writing is
for and about (Johns, 1997), and then they can cope with other genre writing in the future
since they have been trained to self-learn the genre and are equipped with the skills of
analysing a text. On the other hand, a further keyword analysis can help writers to identify the
conventional words and patterns used to realise the communicative purposes of a genre and to
attend to the variations across disciplines, cultures, media or time. By employing these
keywords in their genre texts, students works can look more authentic and thus be accepted
in discourse communities.

Conclusion
This research investigates keywords used in book blurbs of academic textbooks across
disciplines. The keywords identified in the soft and hard science areas not only represent their
differentiated assumptions of epistemology and ontology but also exhibit which theoretical
stands and pedagogical methodology dominate as the mainstream in respective academic
communities at the current time. They exhibit different assumptions about the relationship
between writers and readers, the status of knowledge, and the methods of knowledge delivery.
Since the present study is a preliminary investigation, there are unavoidable limitations
in the design of this research project. First, the size of the corpus and the discipline of the
book blurbs are limited. Therefore, more texts from other disciplines should be added to
increase the generalisability of the results. Furthermore, cross-contextual or cross-cultural
comparisons of this genre, such as examining book blurbs written in L1 and L2 contexts and
by native or non-native speakers should also be conducted. Second, to better understand how
book blurbs actually impact students or teachers choices in terms of purchasing academic
textbooks, continued investigations such as ethnographic methods or interviews with
readers/buyers need to be integrated into projects that concentrate on corpus analysis.

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 2012 , . --
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Proceedings of 2012 Language and Language Teaching Conference

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ISBN978-986-03-6023-3 ()

 Table of Contents

z Photos of the Opening Ceremony and the Closing Ceremony............................................... 1

z Photos of the Keynote Speech................................................................................................ 2

z Photos of Paper Presentations ................................................................................................ 3

z Conference Program............................................................................................................... 5

z CV of the Keynote Speaker.................................................................................................... 8

z Keynote Speech...................................................................................................................... 9

z Using Turnitin as a Tool to Measure the Effectiveness of Teaching Summary and

Paraphrase to Beginning Second Language Academic Writers
Charles M. Papa ................................................................................................................... 24

z An Investigation of Out-of-class Writing Behavior and Attitudes of EFL Writing

Learners
Yi Chi, Yao / Charles M. Papa.............................................................................................. 36

z Speech Rate and Speech Intelligibility in Children with Cerebral Palsy

Li-mei Chen / Fan-Yin Cheng / Han-chih Ni....................................................................... 42

z Learning Phonetics with Online Resources

Hsin, Tien-Hsin .................................................................................................................... 48

z Dutch as Spoken in Belgium Differs from the Variety Spoken in the Netherlands, Or
Does It? Awareness and Assessment of Speech among Polish Students of Ductch
Philolopgy
Robertus de Louw ................................................................................................................ 54

z Keyness in Academic Textbook Blurbs: Lexical Variations across Disciplines

Wenhsien Yang .................................................................................................................... 63

z Investigating the Nature of Teaching Childrens Literature in the College Classroom: A

Discourse Analysis
Fion Kuo............................................................................................................................... 73

z Genitive Case in English Gerund Clause

Ai-li Hsin.............................................................................................................................. 81

z The Development of Zaishou in Mandarin Chinese: An Evolvement From Subjectivity

to Grammaticalization
Victoria I-Chen Lin .............................................................................................................. 88

z Effect of Incorporating Service Learning into an Academic Course for English

Language Learners
Wen-Ling Lou / Jim Gau ..................................................................................................... 96