How to Start and Finish Medical Research Writing

Cultural Variations in English Writing by Japanese

Abstract

The successful medical writing in English depends upon the adoption of the genre scheme. This paper discusses the cultural variations which were found in the contrastive schematic analysis of medical research articles from intranational journals published in Japan and international journals published in U.K. and U.S.A.. My analysis was targeted at the starting (Introduction) and the finishing (the last paragraph of Discussion) sections, because they seem to reflect the author even when he hardly deviates from the rather rigid formats of Methods and Results. The variations include (1) a succinct introduction (2) diluted motivation (3) weak advertizing and (4) satisfied results. My findings support the preceding intercultural hypotheses: high-context vs. low-context, linear vs. gyre, writer-responsible vs. reader-responsible, or form-oriented vs. content-oriented dichotomies. A keen awareness of these intercultural variations relevant to the genre scheme, it is claimed, is likely to be of benefit for medical article writing in English by Japanese.