In recent years the concept of 'register' has been increasingly replaced by emphasis on the analysis of genre, which relates work in sociolinguistics, text linguistics and discourse analysis to the study of specialist areas of language. This book is a clear, authoritative guide to this complex area. He provides a survey of approaches to varieties of language, and considers these in relation to communication and task-based language learning. Swales outlines an approach to the analysis of genre, and then proceeds to consider examples of different genres and how they can be made accessible through genre analysis. This is important reading for all those working in teaching English for academic purposes and also of interest to those working in post-secondary writing and composition due to relevant issues in writing across the curriculum.