Linguistic Features, Errors, and Genre Structure of Police Investigative Reports in Malawi

Police officers are at the frontline of crime investigation. As part of their duties, they are required to write crime reports that accurately reflect the findings of their investigations. The reports are important documents which are required during court prosecution. The study examined linguistic features, errors and genre structure of police investigative reports in Malawi. The study used a sample of 19 reports obtained from Nkhata Bay Police Station and Kamwendo Police Post. The analysis employed the theories of Textual Metafunction, Error Analysis and Genre Analysis. Each theory was employed to address each objective. Findings show that police reports in Malawi are marked with specialised lexical, syntactic and discourse features. The reports are further characterised by a distinct genre structure with four generic moves. The study further established that police reports contain various linguistic errors related to capitalisation, ill-formed sentences, incorrect tense and number, misspellings and incorrect use of function words, which negatively affect clarity and comprehension. The study recommends improved capacity building for police officers through the development of specialised training modules on report writing that incorporate direct teaching of linguistics and continuous professional development on writing courses.