The PhD thesis report: building trust in an emerging genre

Genres come about when new communicative needs emerge in a community of practice and its members have to devise efficient discursive ways to meet them. This is the case of the emerging academic genre of PhD thesis reports. PhD thesis reports are international scholars’ written assessments of the import and value of the semi-final versions of European students’ PhD theses, which, if positive, lead to the conferment of the Doctor Europaeus certificate. The reports are therefore official documents, having important consequences for the parties concerned. However, they are not public documents, since each of them is meant for only a few addressees: the PhD thesis supervisor, the PhD thesis committee, the PhD candidate and the administration of the university the PhD candidate will be graduating from. Indeed, PhD thesis reports fit the profile of occluded genres (Swales 1996, 46): while they play a crucial role “in the administrative and evaluative functioning of the research worlds” (Swales 2004, 18), they are kept out of sight not only of outsiders and apprentices, but also of the larger group of expert practitioners. In this paper I examine two aspects of the PhD thesis report genre: the rhetorical strategies implemented to fulfil its main communicative purpose, and the discursive patterns adopted to build trust with its varied readership. More specifically, I first outline the context in which PhD thesis reports are produced and trace their communicative profile, briefly referring to the literature on teacher feedback provided on university students’ written work, and on the academic role and goals of thesis writing. Then I present the data considered for the study. Next, I describe how the report writers assess theses and manifest their presence in the reports, pointing out how these complementary communicative tasks converge in the final recommendations regarding the theses. By analysing the content of the texts, I offer an account of the discursive features and strategies through which the report writers build a relationship of trust with their multiple addressees. Finally, I draw some preliminary conclusions from the study.