Academic journalese for the Internet:: a study of native English-speaking editors’ changes to texts written by Danish and Finnish professionals

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to investigate, within the textual framework of academic journalese, what happens to Danish and Finnish writers’ English texts when edited by native English-speaking editors for publication on the World Wide Web. We use the term academic journalese to describe texts written by researchers or professionals with a background in research that are easily available to large audiences outside the academic world. By using rhetorical, text linguistic, and editorial concepts in the analysis, we have traced and identified the types of changes to which a number of texts have been subjected during editing to make them compatible with editorial requirements for the genre and standards for UK English. Comparisons between the edited and unedited versions of our corpus documents show that adjustments occur in both directions along the explicitness–implicitness dimension and are frequent in both Finnish and Danish texts. The results further suggest that certain features that have in previous studies emerged as typical of native Finnish writers’ English texts, are shared by native Danish writers as well.