Parallel to a general increase in interest towards genre analysis, a paradigm shift can be observed in the past four decades (Sections 2.3.1–2.3.4), which is summarized in Figure 2. Starting in the 1970s-80s from two major directions, text analysis initially focused on either the individual writer (and the writing processes) or the structure of the text, concentrating on discourse features that account for surface level phenomena. Beginning in the 1990s, genre analysis placed the studied discourse in its socio-cultural context and studied its functions in discourse communities. However, generalizable statements can only be made based on a considerable number of texts, which gave rise to corpus-based approaches and the computerized analysis of huge corpora in different genres. While computer-assisted text analysis remains at the center of attention, especially with the introduction of natural language processing artificial intelligence, several aspects of discourse still need a human’s perspective for closer contextualized observations. Thus, qualitative text analysis still has its place and exists side-by-side with computer-assisted approaches.