‘Nominations and applications invited’ - textual conventions of academic discourse reflected in academic job ads

This paper aims at investigating whether the linguistic strategies and features generally attributed to academic discourse are reflected in the texts of online academic job postings, and if so, to what degree such elements make academic job ads different from their corporate counterparts. This corpus-based study focuses on job advertisements understood as samples of written academic and corporate discourses. The function that academic job postings perform for academic communities may be considered parallel to the role that recruitment ads announcing business-related positions play in corporate communities. This functional homogeneity is reflected in numerous similarities between the textual strategies used in both sub-corpora. The more ‘academic’ character of academic job postings manifests itself primarily through a higher degree of grammatical formality, and limited use of the personal voice and explicit persuasion.