'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants': Recontextualization in Writing from Sources

Despite calls for more research into the writing expertise of senior scientists, the literature reveals surprisingly little about the writing strategies of successful scientist writers. The present paper addresses the gap in the literature by reporting a study that investigated the note-taking strategies of an expert writer, a Chinese professor of biochemistry. Primarily based on interview data, the paper describes the expert's recontextualization (Linell, Text 18:143-157, 1998) strategies at three levels: 'accumulating writing materials' by modifying source texts, composing from 'collections' of cut-and-pasted chunks in drafting a review article, and adopting reusable citations in sources as a 'map'. It is emphasized that through repeatedly revising his paper in light of his rhetorical intentions in a new context of meaning, the expert writer would maximally recontextualize the source-based text segments and citations in the paper, averting transgressive intertextuality (Chandrasoma et al., J Lang Identity Educ 3:171-193, 2004) as a result. The paper ends by highlighting the pedagogical implications of the study for English for Professional Academic Purposes (EPAP).