A genre-based study of biomedical editorials and letters to the editor: a contrastive analysis

This paper reports on a genre-based contrastive analysis of the textual organization of biomedical texts. In order to provide the maximum educational value to our research, our corpus is made up of 100 biomedical texts divided as follows: 25 Letters to the Editor, 25 Cartas al director, 25 Editorials and 25 Editoriales. Following Paltridge's approach, based on simple keys to symbolize the main parts of discourse in the environmental area, we developed a similar analysis to work with the rhetorical structure of the texts of another area, i.e. Medicine. After studying the informational structure of the texts and analyzing the results, we found striking differences when comparing the discourse organization in texts of various sub-genres. This shows that each genre has unique linguistic patterns which are not shared with the rest.