Grant seeking - the first step in knowledge production - has been an indispensable part of academic life, yet a challenging task for neophyte as well as veteran scholars. We are always curious about how grant winners compose their abstracts, cite previous work, present their proposed study, and negotiate with gate-keepers behind the scene. Building upon ethnographic data and a large corpus of authentic research grant proposals and grant reviews, this book intends to demystify the grant seeking activity. It is an invaluable resource for grant agencies, grant reviewers and grant writers, particularly novice grant writers and/or non-native English writers.

"Discourses and Tales of Grant-Seeking Activity" is however more than a resource book. It is one of the few studies that draw upon two genre theories, encompass both quantitative and qualitative research approaches, and unite an exploration of macro-level recurrences in discursive activity and micro-level examinations of individual writers' agency, positioning, negotiation and identity construction. It enhances our understanding of the development of professional expertise in academia and thus will be of interest to researchers in the fields of academic writing, genre analysis and Language for Specific Purposes (LSP).

Contents: Review of Research on Grant-Seeking Activity - Research Writing in terms of Genre and Person-in-the-World - Window Display: A Corpus-Based Study of Research Grant Proposal Abstracts - Voices and Positioning: Grant Writers' Referential Acts in the Literature Review - Averral and attribution: A Study of Niche Claims - Voices behind the Curtain: A Genre-Based Study of Grant Reviews - Pushing at the Gatekeeper's Fence: Case study of Two Scholars Seeking Grants in Hong Kong.

Haiying Feng is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, researcher of the Research Centre for Business English and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of International Business and Economics, China. She obtained her MA from the University of British Columbia, and her PhD from City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include genre analysis, academic writing, and English for Specific Purposes.