International Academic Conference (IAC) 2013. http://iac2013.uitm.edu.my ISBN 978-983-41527-7-2 Dissertations Acknowledgment Pattern of Malaysian Post Graduates Juliana Mohd Nor 1 Ngo Kea Leng 2 Mohd Ariff Nafizi Ibrahim 2 Che Wan Khalidawaty Khalid 2 Abstract It has been said that text analysis is a field of study that could yield rich results to interested researchers. This study in particular examines a genre of writing consisting of acknowledgement in Malaysians post graduates dissertations. It focuses on the structure of masters’ dissertations acknowledgement written by Malaysian post graduates students from various races in Malaysia. The purpose of this study is to examine Malaysian post graduates’ acknowledgement patterns, identify insertions of religious element as well as find other distinctions in the pattern that may make it similar or distinctive to other findings found by other researchers. The method of this study is by the comparison of structure. The corpus of this study consists of selected acknowledgements gathered from several Malaysian universities e-print databases. The results show that there are similarities but also some differences between the patterns studied. It is acknowledged by the researchers that aside from the indirect rhetorical nature of Asian writers, there could also be other considerations that could have influenced the results of the findings. Keywords: Acknowledgement pattern; distinctions; similarities; indirect rhetoric; post graduates. Introduction Background of the study Writing a dissertation is hard work and one is never completed without assistance from others. Thus it is only right and proper to acknowledge these assistance and this action is a seemingly agreed-must-have-component of dissertations everywhere. Dissertations acknowledgement writers though, are limited, in the sense that they are only able to write about only limited number of pages of acknowledgement per dissertation. Being that most people only have one or 1 Juliana Mohd Nor, UiTM Kuala Terengganu, Academy of Language Studies, julia073@tganu.uitm.edu.my; 2 Ngo Kea Leng, UiTM Kuala Terengganu, Mohd Ariff Nafizi Ibrahim, Che Wan Khalidawaty Khalid, Academy of Language Studies and Faculty of Business Studies, klngo@tganu.uitm.edu.my, mohda141@tganu.uitm.edu.my, chewa485@tganu.uitm.edu.my;