Writing research articles is crucial in any academic’s development and is thus an important component of the academic discourse. The Introduction section is often seen as a difficult task within the research article genre. This study presents two metrics of rhetorical moves in academic writing: step-n-grams and lengths of steps. While scholars agree that expert writers follow the general pattern described in the CARS model (Swales, 1990), this study complements previous studies with empirical quantitative data that highlight how writers progress from one rhetorical function to another in practice, based on 50 recent papers by expert writers. The discussion shows the significance of the results in relation to writing instructors and data-driven learning.

This paper introduces PyCantonese, an open-source Python library for Cantonese linguistics and natural language processing. After the library design, implementation, corpus data format, and key datasets included are introduced, the paper provides an overview of the currently implemented functionality: stop words, handling Jyutping romanization, word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing Cantonese text.