Bedienungsanleitungen zum Forschen. Eine vergleichende Analyse von Hinweisen und Leitfäden zum wissenschaftlichen Schreiben an deutschen Universitäten

At German universities, guidelines on academic writing are very common and available to all students: they serve both as a guide for writing term papers and as a “guarantee” of standardization in academic writing. Based on models of functional variety linguistics, this article attempts to define these text forms in more detail. A corpus of publicly accessible documents from the homepages of German university faculties is analyzed comparatively with the aid of software. These texts are examined not only in terms of their functionality as tools for study, but also as metacommunicative examples of self-reflexive practice in academic life. The complexity of these objects of investigation is reflected in the intention to define and formulate stylistic, content-related, and ethical principles of academic work.