The goal of this paper is to investigate the academic genre abstract of master's thesis in the context of the research project Teletandem Brasil: foreign languages for all. Taking as starting point the concepts of genre from the social-rhetorical perspective we analyzed ten abstracts of theses (a genre which is already legitimized) related to that project (which is a relatively new context). As a result of the analysis, we noticed the occurrence of a phenomenon that we called "reduction of rhetorical effort", which consists in erasing rhetorical units that justify the validity of the research described in the abstracts analyzed. Among the contributions of this paper, we can highlight relevant reflections not only to the discourse communities that support the academic genre but also to the researchers who aspire to a place in this niche.
Discourse communities; academic genre; social-rhetorical perspective
