ABSTRACT
Anglophonicity has become a hallmark of the contemporary academie and scientific world. Many journals that used to publish in major languages such as German, French or Russian have been converting to English; the great majority of the many new journals are unabashedly anglophone; and in many countries tenure and promotion is increasingly tied to English-language publication. This trend toward English dominance has recently been both celebrated (Crystal, 1997) and critiqued (Swales, 1997). Irrespective of the merits of these arguments, most non-native speaker (NNS) academics and faculty are fully aware of the encroachment of English on their national academic cultures and of its consequences for them as individuals. However, there is another, if more patchily distributed, less recognized, contemporary trend that may further add to the compositional burden of the non-native speaker of English. This is the shift away from standard formal and impersonal styles of academic writing to ones that allow more personal comment, narration and stylistic variation. It is with this latter development that this chapter is concerned.
