Flexibility features in patent writing

International patents are increasingly demanded in academic circles as a sign of excellence and compete with situated genres such as projects, grants, PhD supervisions, books and journal articles, especially in hard science environments. The scarce modelling and dissemination of the genre so far, however, together with some wrong assumptions about the technical register, have helped propagate a series of “genre fallacies” that contribute to perpetuating undesirable writing practices and make the case for explicit instruction. In this paper I advocate a pedagogy of patent writing based on the deconstruction of such myths, which are basically concerned with a notion of the genre as rigid and static, highly impersonal, and exclusively descriptive. My study, based on a qualitative and corpus methodology, revolves around the crucial role of metadiscourse as evidence of flexibility in patent texts.