I began this volume with the aim of reappraising the usefulness of a stylistics approach to the analysis of professional discourse, a line of study that had by and large been neglected since the seminal work by Crystal and Davy published in 1969. Re-reading Crystal and Davy's work it struck me that it was still an extremely valid way of approaching the argument, but that it needed reappraising in the light of the vast amount of study carried out in the forty-five years since then. At the same time, after a number of years working and researching in the field of professional discourse, there seemed to me to be a need to draw together the various strands in order to make sense holistically of the different ways of looking at and exploring professional discourse. Moreover, it seemed that notions of stylistics itself had also changed in the meantime, on both a theoretical and a practical level, and that the modern contextualised view of stylistics could provide exactly that holistic approach which was lacking. As Cameron observed in 2003 with regard to analysing the discourse of the sciences: ‘I am not alone in finding the existing tools of applied linguistics sometimes inadequate for such holistic enterprises’ (2003: 40).

This volume is the result of that endeavour and I hope it has shown that a stylistics-oriented approach can indeed prove fruitful to those studying professional discourse. My contention throughout has been that such an approach can play a major role in empowering students and practitioners by increasing their awareness of the stylistic features of domain-specific texts, enabling them to make sense of the texts. At the same time, it can enhance the credibility of their language production within the community of practice; after all ‘stylistic practice is at the crux of performativity’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2013: 249). It can therefore help them achieve membership of professional communities, enabling access to professional groups of practice and avoiding potential exclusion. By learning how to deconstruct and reconstruct texts, students and practitioners can overcome or preempt such potential exclusion processes, calling into question the gatekeeping function, and at the same time helping the discourse community evolve and become more inclusive.