Discourse structure and variation in manuscript reviews: Implications for genre categorization

• Sub-categories of manuscript reviews foreground different communicative purposes.
• Major revision reviews are characterized by recommendation discourse units.
• Reject reviews foreground negative evaluation discourse units.
• Grammatical features of recommendation appear more in major revision reviews.
• Negation appears more in reject reviews.

Recent studies on the manuscript review, an occluded genre, have focused mainly on its discourse features and not on discourse variation in reviews according to final reviewer recommendation. This paper reports on a study of two sub-sets of manuscript reviews written for English for Specific Purposes, with the final reviewer recommendation of “major revision” and “reject.” An analysis of the organization of the commentary section of manuscript reviews indicates that “major revision” reviews are characterized by discourse units with the function of recommendation while “reject” reviews tend to foreground discourse units with the function of negative evaluation. Lexicogrammatical features associated with the functions of recommendation and negative evaluation were also found to vary in frequency in the two sub-groups of texts through analysis using Python, a computer language. I argue that “reject” and “major revision” reviews have different positions on two continua, one for recommendation and the other for negative evaluation, and I use these positions to explain the variation in discourse organization and lexicogrammatical features revealed in the “text-first” analysis suggested by Askehave and Swales (2001). I suggest that sub-categories for heterogeneous genres with multiple communicative purposes could be established through use of the centrality of a particular purpose.