Readings

Teaching the Conventions of
Academic Discourse
> Teresa Thonney

New Voice
A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic
writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across
the curriculum.
G iven the current emphasis on disciplinary discourses, it’s not surprising that
so little recent attention has been devoted to identifying conventions that are
universal in academic discourse. In this essay, I argue that there are shared features
that unite academic writing, and that by introducing these features to first-year
students we provide them with knowledge they can apply and refine in each new
discipline they encounter.
Some scholars believe that making generalizations about academic writing
is impossible. Just as there is “no autonomous, generalizable skill called ball using
or ball handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games,” David
Russell argues, there is no “autonomous, generalizable skill or set of skills called
‘writing’ that can be learned and then applied to all genres or activities” (57, 59).
Because there are no “general” skills that students can learn and transfer to all
writing situations, some suggest that students would benefit more from learning
about the ways writing conventions vary across academic disciplines and discourse
communities (Wardle 784).
Others (such as Berkenkotter and Huckin; Freedman) believe that writing
conventions can’t be taught and that trying to teach them “assumes that one can
learn to write academic genres by adhering to a definite rule-set” (Lynch-Biniek).
But linguistic scholars (including Swales; MacDonald; Bazerman; Biber) have dem-
onstrated that patterns and formulas prevail in academic writing, and many have
described the benefits of teaching writing conventions to students (see, for example,
Williams and Colomb). By teaching conventional ways to introduce topics, iden-
tify sources, and organize arguments, for instance, we provide “a valuable tool for
clarifying academic mysteries to large numbers of students” (Birkenstein and Graff).
In fact,Wilder and Wolfe found that students who were explicitly taught language
conventions in a literature course wrote better essays and reported comparable or
higher levels of enjoyment in the course than those receiving no instruction in
writing conventions (170).
Te a c h i n g t h e C o n v e n t i o n s o f A c a d e m i c D i s c o u r s e 347
Copyright © 2011 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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As Hassel and Giordano noted in a recent TETYC article, the need for
explicit instruction in writing conventions is particularly acute at open-admission
two-year colleges, where many students, including those testing into college-level
writing courses, are unfamiliar with rhetorical strategies expected in college writing
(25). Even freshmen at universities, when asked to write college papers, can feel like
they are being asked “to build a house without any tools” (Sommers and Saltz 131).
Studies by Carroll, Herrington and Curtis, and McCarthy reveal considerable
variety in the writing undergraduates do and in the disciplinary approaches they
encounter. Disciplines differ in modes of inquiry, in forms of proof, and in meth-
ods of research. These differences manifest themselves in writing, as documented
in corpus-based studies by Swales, MacDonald, Hyland, and others, differences
students will appreciate when they learn to write the genres of their chosen majors.
Despite this variation, some principles appear in all academic writing guides,
no matter the discipline, as Karen Bennett found in her survey of forty-one style
manuals. Some shared features, such as source citation, are, of course, realized differ-
ently across disciplines; but Bennett found “remarkable consensus as regards general
principles, methods of textual construction, and the kinds of grammatical and lexical
features to be used” (43). No first-year student is expected to write like discipline
insiders when writing in entry-level courses that are “predisciplinary in both theory
and practice” (Diller and Oates 54). But research indicates students are rewarded
when they produce prose that resembles that of experienced academic writers.
To determine what rhetorical features appear in the prose of experienced
academic writers, I analyzed twenty-four research articles—four articles from each
of six disciplines: psychology, sports medicine, biology, marketing, literature, and
engineering.The articles were randomly selected from the following peer-reviewed
journals:
American Journal of Community Psychology
American Journal of Sports Medicine
Journal of Cell Biology
Journal of Marketing Research
PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America)
Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
My analysis reveals six standard “moves” in academic writing:
> Writers respond to what others have said about their topic.
> Writers state the value of their work and announce the plan for their papers.
> Writers acknowledge that others might disagree with the position they’ve
taken.
> Writers adopt a voice of authority.
> Writers use academic and discipline-specific vocabulary.
> Writers emphasize evidence, often in tables, graphs, and images.
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Introducing first-year composition students to these conventions of academic writ-
ing provides them with knowledge they can use now and refine later when writing
in their chosen disciplines.
Let’s start with the standard way academic writers begin—by summarizing
what others have said about their topic.
1. Academic Writers Respond to What Others Have Written about

Their Topic
When academics write, they join a conversation.To show they understand this they
refer to what others have already written about their subject. This feature appears
in every article of the sample. Consider this passage from a report in the sports
medicine sample articles:
In the past decades, major insights have been gained into how intrinsic factors
and extrinsic signals control and guide the development of dendrites and den-
dritic spines and how patterned neural activity shapes this process (Hering and
Sheng, 2001; . . .Van Aelst and Cline, 2004). Nonetheless, large gaps still exist in
our knowledge about how all these pathways integrate and execute their function
at the molecular level. (Huang, Zang, and Reichardt 527)
By referring to what others have said about a topic, writers accomplish two things:
they show that they are addressing an issue that matters, and they establish that
there is more to be said about it.
Sometimes writers enter the conversation by taking issue with the conclu-
sions of previous researchers, as in this passage from the literature articles:
[Christopher] Lane’s thesis, linking ambivalent national-symbolic identifications
on the part of homosexual writers to specifically colonial rhetorical structures, is
convincing (3); however, I would position Auden’s case differently, as paradoxical
to this founding paradox of colonial passion. (Christie 1576)
Others have noted that disciplines vary in the way disagreement gets ex-
pressed. Linton, Madigan, and Johnson found that in literary criticism, for example,
attacks can get personal, unlike in other disciplines where disagreements are ignored
or limited to criticizing research methods (73–74). But the writers in my sample,
including those representing literature, show respect for previous research. Under-
graduates, given their junior status, would be wise to follow suit when disagreeing
with published scholars.
Like published scholars, undergraduates write research-based papers, today
more than ever (Lunsford and Lunsford 793). But they struggle in two notable
ways. First, many students fail to contribute to the conversation. Instead of analyz-
ing, synthesizing, or adding to what others have said, they merely show they have
“done the reading.” Second, in student papers, incorrect or missing source citations
abound. Tinberg and Nadeau’s recent study of first-year students at a community
college reminds us that for students the most in-depth discussion and practice of
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writing occurs in their required writing course (128). One way we can prepare
students for writing across the curriculum is with assignments that involve sum-
marizing, synthesizing, attributing writers, and commenting on what they have said.
2. Academic Writers State the Value of Their Work and Announce the
Plan for Their Papers
One reason academics refer to what has been written about an issue is to establish
that the issue matters. Another reason is to show that their research addresses an
aspect of the issue still unresolved. All twenty-four writers in our sample explain
that their research is necessary, unique, or otherwise of value, as in this passage from
the marketing articles:
The vast majority of research that has assessed the effect of price promotions on
brand evaluation has studied the effect after product trial, rather than pretrial. . . .
Unlike previous studies . . . , we examine the effects of price promotions pretrial
to isolate their informational impact on brand quality perceptions from the
potentially moderating effect of prior personal experience with the brand.
(Raghubir and Corfman 212)
Scholars must sell their work to editors and reviewers; but students too must “sell”
their work to their professors. By explaining why their topic is important, how
their approach to a topic is unique, or even why they chose to write about a topic,
students set their papers apart from papers that lack purpose.
In addition to stating the value of their work early, academic writers help
readers navigate their texts. All twenty-four titles in our sample announce the spe-
cific topic of the article; a few (particularly in the sciences) also convey the research
results. Here is an example from the psychology articles:
Conceptualizing and Measuring Historical Trauma among American Indian
People
From the biology articles:
Process Outgrowth in Oligodendrocytes is Mediated by CNP, a Novel Microtu-
bule Assembly Myelin Protein
Twenty-three of twenty-four articles also include subheadings that announce the
topic of sections:
Effects of Multiple Ankle Sprains on Postural Sway
Matters of Conscience in Machiavelli and Macbeth
Another way academic writers prepare readers for what is ahead is with an
explicit statement of purpose. Here is an example from the engineering articles:
This paper describes the development of a second generation of piezoelectric
paint and the characterization of sensors made with it. (Hale et al. 1)
In some articles, writers announce their hypothesis:
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We hypothesized that there would be an increase in ankle repositioning errors
and postural sway in basketball players who had sustained bilateral ankle sprains,
under conditions in which they had to rely more heavily on ankle proprioceptive
input. (Fu and Hui-Chan 1175)
In other articles, the statement of purpose expresses the writer’s opinion:
I . . . precede my discussion of the trope of the castrato with a brief historical
overview of the situation and reception of actual castrati singers. I then show how
Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)
used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of
class conflicts, gender concepts, and the nature of art. (Krimmer 1544)
Many students think the main claim in an academic argument must be an assertive,
polemic statement. But corpus-based analyses reveal that most academic writers
state their main claim matter-of-factly (Conrad 119–20). Statements that begin
with “This paper describes,”“We hypothesized,” and “I then show” (from the above
examples) are not argumentative; they hardly seem like opinions.
Most writers in our sample identify the paper’s organization along with the
purpose. Here is an example from the psychology articles:
First, we will provide an overview of previous work conceptualizing historical
psychological distress among American Indians. Second, we will present a sum-
mary of qualitative data from elders on two American Indian reservations in the
upper Midwest that was used to develop a measure of historical trauma. Third, we
will describe measures of historical trauma and provide measurement characteris-
tics and frequencies on the basis of a sample of 143 parents. (Whitbeck et al. 120)
From the marketing articles:
The article is organized into four sections . . . that systematically investigate the
effect of package shape on volume perceptions, preference and choice, consump-
tion (perceived and actual), and postconsumption satisfaction. (Raghubir and
Krishna 314)
Some composition instructors want students to avoid statements of purpose
that begin “In this paper” and to avoid “blueprint” statements that announce topics.
But such statements are commonplace in academic journals, and many professors
reward students who make reading easy. In their analysis of 50 graded essays (from
various disciplines), Tedick and Mathison noticed “the general pattern was that
subjects received higher holistic scores on the essays—regardless of prompt type—
that they framed well enough for readers to be able to make predictions about the
content to come” (206).
In addition to providing subheadings and overviews, many writers in the
sample stop within their articles to announce what is next, as in this example from
the marketing articles:
In the next section, we discuss relevant research on visual mental imagery in the
design, marketing, and psychology literature, present a conceptual model of how
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visual mental imagery influences the customer appeal of the product designed,
and propose a set of hypotheses. (Dahl, Chattopadhyay, and Gorn 19)
Most writers end by summarizing what has been covered and reiterating the value
of their research, as shown in this example from sports medicine:
To our knowledge, this study provides the longest follow-up in the literature
of patients undergoing meniscal repair with the arrow. . . . Indeed, this study
represents the longest follow-up in the literature on any of the available all-inside
meniscal repair devices. (Lee and Diduch 1140–41)
Every article in the sample includes a statement of purpose, preview sen-
tences, review sentences, and sentences that announce the value of the research.
Student research and writing may not be as complicated as that of the scholars in
our sample, but students write for professors who read many papers—quickly. A
wealth of research has shown that when writers signal where they are going and
how they will get there, readers read faster and remember better what they have
read (Meyer 212–16). This is an important principle for students to learn.
3. Academic Writers Acknowledge That Others Might Disagree with the

Position They’ve Taken
Because scholars recognize that others might disagree with their conclusions, they
sprinkle their writing with qualifiers, or hedges, such as “probably,” “possibly,”
“maybe,” and “it seems,” particularly when writing to colleagues.Writers use hedges
to make statements more accurate and to avoid appearing dogmatic. Examples of
hedges are italicized in the following sentences from our sample. First from the
sports medicine articles:
The onset latency to the ADM was not affected, whereas the onset latency to the
FDI was affected, suggesting, the lesion may be located in the palm, distal to the
motor branch to the ADM. (Akuthota et al. 1228)
From the psychology articles:
[Oppressed people] tend to be passive and unable to recognize their own capacity
to transform their social reality; and their existence is often accepted on the basis
of destiny, bad luck or supernatural will. (Balcazar, Garate-Serafini, and Keys 250)
Writers in the sample also anticipate potential critics by recognizing the limitations
of their findings:
More research, varying the factors previously identified, is necessary to establish
the generalizability of our findings to a broader range of product design contexts.
(Dahl, Chattopadhyay, and Gorn 27)
Professors sometimes complain that students fail to back their claims with
sufficient evidence.While this is sometimes true, the problem can be partly due to
students’ failure to qualify assertions. Some students, especially those who are not
native speakers of English, underuse qualifiers (e.g.,“apparently,”“likely,”“possibly”)
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and overuse words expressing certainty (e.g., “really,” “of course,” “certainly”) in
their writing (Gilquin and Paquot 47).
By teaching students how to distinguish between statements of “fact” and
opinion, how to differentiate between generalities and specifics, and how and when
to moderate claims with hedges, we help them write better arguments in any dis-
cipline. Students readily see the difference between “Surveys prove Americans are
changing their attitudes about same-sex marriages” and “Surveys suggest Americans
may be changing their attitudes about same-sex marriage,” and with practice they
learn to moderate sweeping generalities.
4. Academic Writers Adopt a Voice of Authority

Although tentative in their claims, academic writers still write with authority.
Conveying authority is understandably challenging for student writers. David
Bartholomae describes their dilemma: Students “have to speak in the voice and
through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom; and they not only have
to do this, they have to do it before they know what they are doing . . . and be-
fore, at least in the terms of our disciplines, they have anything to say” (156). Even
graduate students have difficulty establishing an ethos of authority when writing as
initiates in their field (Blakeslee 133). But students can learn to imitate techniques
of experienced writers.
Using First or Third Person

Writers in a few disciplines, such as engineering, tend to avoid first person in for-
mal writing. A look at two passages from our sample, the first from marketing, the
second from engineering, is revealing:
In this article, we examine the effect of elongation on (1) perceived volume, (2)
perceived consumption, (3) actual consumption, (4) postconsumption satisfaction,
and (5) choice. As described in Figure 1, our model suggests that package shape
directly affects perceived volume and through this, indirectly and inversely affects
perceived consumption. (Raghubir and Krishna 323)
This paper presents a new approach to model the friction layer in brake systems
in the investigation of noise and vibration, especially high-frequency squeal. . . .
The friction layer is modeled as a coupling stiffness between the brake pad and
the rotor as a combination of the elastic stiffness of the friction layer superim-
posed on the coupling modal stiffness of the brake-pad combination. . . . By
incorporating the earlier results in a two degree of freedom model, the predicted
frequencies were shown to be close to the squeal frequencies obtained from field
tests. (Paliwal et al. 520–21)
The engineering paragraph includes no mention of who completed the research
(“predicted frequencies were shown”). In fact, the paragraph is from a journal
that advises authors: “Papers should be written in the third person in an objective,
formal and impersonal style.”
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But in the rest of the sample, nineteen of twenty writers use first person.
Writers in medicine, marketing, psychology, biology, and literature all make clear
that they formed hypotheses, collected data, and reached conclusions. From the
sports medicine articles:
We compared the results obtained from the injured ankle with those from the
uninjured ankle. (Santilli et al. 1186)
My colleagues and I interviewed 28 adult Bosnians attending a community
mental health program. (Miller 225)
Compared to the engineers, these writers also use more active voice con-
structions—another way to convey authority. For engineers, the average number of
occurrences of passive voice within 500-word excerpts is nearly twice the average
for any other discipline in the sample (15.8 occurrences in engineering versus 8.8
occurrences in sports medicine, 4.3 in psychology, 6.0 in marketing, 7.0 in cell
biology, and 3.25 in literature).
The challenge for student writers is knowing how and when to use first
person. Many students needlessly preface statements with “It seems to me” or “I
think” (Gilquin and Paquot 48–49, 55–57). Others, attempting to convey authority,
adopt the voice of moralizing parent. With direction, however, students improve.
They can learn to judge when writing “I think” has purpose and when writing
“I think” is pointless. (McKinney Maddalena provides excellent help for students
concerning when to use first person.)
Writing Concisely
Another way writers create an ethos of authority is by using a high percentage of
meaning-carrying words. In the 1970s, Jean Ure developed a method for deter-
mining a text’s lexical density by calculating the percentage of lexical words (445).
Lexical words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—classes of words that
convey meaning and to which we continue to add. Grammatical words include
pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and other determin-
ers—classes of words to which we don’t add.Thus, the following sentence includes
seven lexical words (in bold print):
Some scientists believe that stem cells can be used to treat diseases.
While spoken language includes many grammatical words (Ure found the per-
centage of lexical words in spoken language to be below 40 percent), written texts
tend to be more lexically dense. In Ure’s study (in 1971), the lexical density of a
textbook was 50.2 percent, and the lexical density of a scholarly journal was 52.8
percent (cited in Ventola 159). The lexical density in our sample ranges between
52.8 percent (in sports medicine) and 56.5 percent (in cell biology). In other words,
more words than not are meaning-carrying words.
Writers in our sample pack meaning into sentences:
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They don’t describe “meniscal healing that was incomplete” but instead write
“incomplete meniscal healing.”
Not “sociologists and geographers who are feminists” but “feminist sociolo-
gists and geographers.”
Not “an outdoor site that is exposed” but “exposed outdoor site.”
The average lexical density rate of the sample is 54.4 percent, higher than that of
most types of writing. When we teach students how to revise for conciseness, we
teach them a sure-fire way to improve the quality and authority of their academic
writing.
5. Academic Writers Use Academic and Discipline-Specific Vocabulary

One obvious marker of academic writing is academic vocabulary. Several studies
of academic writing have focused on familiar sequences of three or more words
referred to as “lexical bundles.” They include phrases such as the following:
in order to
the presence of
the fact that
in the case of
as a result of
Lexical bundles like these account for 20 percent of the words in academic prose
(Biber et al. 995), and using these phrases is one indicator of proficiency in aca-
demic writing. But Viviana Cortes found that students rarely use them in their
writing, and when they do use them it is often not in the way published writers
do. She concludes that students would benefit from explicit instruction in lexical
bundles and their functions (420–21). For example, when an assignment involves
summarizing data from studies, an instructor could show students lexical bundles
commonly used to introduce previous research (such as “studies have shown that”
and “have been shown to”) (Conrad 134). Additional ideas for teaching academic
lexical bundles are found in Graff and Birkenstein’s book They Say / I Say.
Another marker of academic writing is specialized language. Scientists have
long been known for co-opting words and using them in new, specialized ways, as
seen in these phrases from our sports medicine and biology articles:
prolongation of the median motor latency
preactivation of the lower extremity muscles
genomic integrity
But this tendency is not unique to scientists—as additional examples from the
sample illustrate. From the engineering articles:
limits of linearity of piezoelectric paint
estimates of construct loadings
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From the marketing articles:
expectancy disconfirmation
From the literature articles:
textual and libidinal potentials of coloniality
Technical words like these precisely and concisely convey specialized meanings to
others in the field and denote one’s membership in any academic community. In
fact, Robyn Woodward-Kron has demonstrated that “adopting the specialist language
of the discipline is intrinsic to learning disciplinary knowledge” (246).
One way to make students aware of specialist language and lexical bundles
is to have them look for recurring terms, stylistic conventions, and other patterns
in a corpus of academic writing. There are many free resources for corpus-based
research, including the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), with
concordancer, available at http://www.americancorpus.org/; and the Michigan Cor-
pus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) at http://micusp.elicorpora.info/.
(Information about additional corpus research and analysis resources is provided by
David Lee at http://tiny.cc/corpora.) Students can use text analysis tools to study
the writing of a specific discipline, to learn how the writing styles of disciplines or
genres vary, or to analyze their own writing. Corpus-based research assignments
also provide students with opportunities to conduct primary research. (See Bowker
and Pearson for assignment ideas.)
6. Academic Writers Emphasize Evidence, Often in Tables, Graphs, and

Images
Academic writing is ultimately judged on the basis of its evidence, and academic
writers use various techniques for highlighting data.
Fourteen (58 percent) of the authors in our sample include tables, graphs,
or charts. Given the prominence of data in academic writing, it is important that
students learn how to “read” quantitative data.Yet, as Joanna Wolfe recently argued,
most first-year students do not understand that writers manipulate “statistical ex-
pressions in order to make an interesting story out of their data” (459). She calls on
composition instructors to discuss quantitative arguments in their courses:
Our students should be able to quickly discern that the statements “there is a
one-in-fifty chance that a bad event will happen” and “there is a 98 percent
chance that everything will be okay” differ only in rhetorical choice between
two mathematically equivalent figures. And students should have practice making
their own arguments from quantitative data, not only so they can see the many
ways in which such claims can be manipulated, but also so they can see the role
that invention plays in statistical data, experimental results, and other quantita-
tive arguments that are often popularly perceived as nonrhetorical “facts.” (455,
original emphasis)
To illustrate the rhetorical nature of graphs, Wolfe provides four graphical
representations of raw data, each lending itself to a different interpretation of the
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data (463–64). With examples like those Wolfe offers, we can show students that
quantitative data are as much “language” issues as they are “math” issues (462).
Images (including photos and drawings) are also common in the sample. All
of the writers representing engineering, sports medicine, and biology use images—to
depict experimental subjects, materials, processes, models, and results. Images are
more prominent in the writing of some disciplines than others, but their rhetorical
power is undeniable.
We process both words and images, Gibson and Zillmann explain, but the
“picture-superiority effect of information acquisition” is well documented (357).
Gibson and Zillmann had subjects read news stories accompanied with varying
images or no images at all. The images influenced subjects more than the words,
even when the images weren’t discussed in a text. Particularly powerful are images
that evoke fear. For example, subjects perceived the risk of getting Blowing Rock
disease from ticks to be higher when photos of child victims accompanied the story
than when photos of ticks accompanied the same story (364–65).
Many have already argued the merits of teaching visual rhetoric in compo-
sition courses and have suggested multimodal assignment ideas. (See, for example,
Bickmore and Christiansen’s article in a recent issue of TETYC; see also Welch,
Lee, and Shuman.) Multimodal assignments are yet another way to prepare students
for academic work across the curriculum.
Suggestions and Conclusion

Despite the variety—including among writers within single discourse communi-
ties—we can give first-year students useful general knowledge about academic
writing. All twenty-four writers in the sample summarize what has been written
about their topics, state the purpose of their writing, establish a reasonable yet
authoritative tone, use the specialized language of their discipline, and emphasize
evidence. When we provide opportunities for practice in these areas in our com-
position courses, we help students develop skills they will use when writing in
other disciplines. A few techniques may facilitate students’ understanding of the
conventions of academic writing:
> Have students read authentic academic texts from various disciplines. Most of the
reading undergraduates do is from textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and
other secondary sources; but authentic academic texts (such as journal articles
or laboratory reports) illustrate the conventions of academic writing. Pro-
viding accessible academic writing is possible no matter what the focus or
pedagogy of a composition course.
> Help students notice how academic writing varies. Learning how academic writ-
ing varies is just as important as learning what it has in common. One way
to make students aware of variety is to show them resources for writing in
different disciplines. For example, www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/ includes
documentation guidelines and sample student papers for humanities, history,
social sciences, and sciences. At www.citationmachine.net students can get
help creating citations in MLA, APA, Turabian, or Chicago styles. Discussing
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why certain moves (such as attributing sources) are realized in different ways
reinforces the importance of audience, purpose, and context. (For discus-
sion of why citation conventions vary, see Hyland; also Linton, Madigan, and
Johnson.) We can’t anticipate all the kinds of writing students will do, but we
can prepare them to expect variety.
> Help students infer and practice academic writing principles—both the universal and
the discipline specific. Having students abstract writing principles by studying
diverse examples promotes understanding (and thus transfer). Ask students
to find patterns, for instance, in how academic authors recognize opposing
views or use hedges. Have them analyze passages documented in different
styles and infer principles underlying all citation systems. To promote under-
standing of discipline-specific conventions, have students analyze the genres
of their majors using concordance software. (Bowker and Pearson’s text
includes assignment ideas, many appropriate for first-year writing courses.)
Or have students report primary research findings in graphs or in papers with
introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections. (For assignment ideas,
see Stoller et al.) Exercises like these help students notice commonality and
variation in academic writing.
> Help students see that academic writing is dynamic. Citation systems have adapted
to accommodate online sources (changes described by Walker). First person
is increasingly common in science writing (a shift explained by McKinney
Maddalena). The familiar IMRAD format (introduction, methods, results, and
discussion) was rare a century ago. (Sollaci and Pereira discuss this change.)
When students realize that language conventions are not fixed “rules,” they
learn that genres and discourse styles evolve to meet the needs of writers.
Discipline-specific studies have shown us how academic writing varies. But we
also need studies that tell us what academic writing has in common. Such studies
can help us provide first-year students with knowledge they can use now when
writing in predisciplinary courses and build on later when writing the specialized
discourse of their chosen fields. <
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362 TETYC May 2011
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Journal of English for Academic Purposes 27 (2017) 42e55
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of English for Academic Purposes

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap
Literary research article abstracts: An analysis of rhetorical

moves and their linguistic realizations*
!1
Gyula Tanko
Department of English Applied Linguistics, School of English and American Studies, Eo
€tvo
€s Lora
!nd University, Budapest, Ra
! ko
!czi út 5., H-
1088, Hungary
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Research article abstracts are the most effective means of sharing research results. This
Received 5 February 2016 function and the evolution of the research article genre have kept the abstract in the focus
Received in revised form 6 March 2017 of academic investigations. However, despite the impressive research output on abstracts,
Accepted 5 April 2017
research addressing specifically literature research article (LRA) abstracts is scarce. This
Available online 15 April 2017
study, therefore, describes the move structure of the LRA abstract, defines the functions of
the identified moves, and discusses their linguistic realizations. To conduct the research, a
Keywords:
corpus consisting of 135 abstracts from four international journals with high impact fac-
Abstracts
Move analysis
tors was compiled and subjected (a) to move analysis performed by a human analyst and
Lexico-grammatical features (b) to software-driven analyses involving text analysis software. The results reveal that LRA
Corpus analysis abstracts have a non-hierarchical eight-move structure with four stable moves, whose
Literature research article functions are to present the background, purpose, methodology and outcomes of the
research. LRA abstracts are a mix of the descriptive and informative abstracts and struc-
turally overlap with the rhetorical structure of RA introductions. They have high syntactic
complexity and lexical density and contain primarily low frequency words. These features
and their high information content make them difficult to process.
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Scientific journals disseminate knowledge and foster interaction, professional development, and the acquisition of
discourse community membership. These functions and the fact that genres evolve (Bazerman, 1988; Gillaerts & Van de
Velde, 2010) keep research articles (RAs) in the focus of attention of academic investigations. A part-genre within RAs that
has become the most read type of research literature with the exponentially increasing research output is the abstract.
Abstracts from a large variety of disciplines have been investigated. Studies were conducted on abstracts in the fields of
medicine (Anderson & Maclean, 1997; Busch-Lauer, 1995; Salager-Meyer, 1990, 1992); biology (Samraj, 2005); biomedicine
(Huckin, 2001); psychology (Hartley, 2003); engineering, physics, marketing, sociology and humanities (Hyland, 2004);
applied linguistics (Santos, 1996; Tseng, 2011); and humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (Stotesbury, 2003). Some
of these studies and additional ones were cross-linguistic investigations of differences between English and German (Busch-
Lauer, 1995), Spanish (Martín-Martín, 2003), Portuguese (Feltrim, Aluísio, & Nunes, 2003), or French journal abstracts (van
*
The research was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K83243).
E-mail address: [email protected].
1
Permanent address: 2022 Tahito !tfalu, Go
€rbe u. 2.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2017.04.003
1475-1585/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
G. Tanko
! / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 27 (2017) 42e55 43
Bonn & Swales, 2007). The importance of the abstract is further underscored by a recent edited volume dedicated to this part-
genre (Bondi & Lore !s Sanz, 2014) and by the numerous publications dedicated to the classroom applications of genre research
findings (Paltridge, 1996; Swales & Feak, 2004, 2009, 2010).
In contrast, English language literary research article (LRA) abstracts have received little attention. A rare exception is
Stotesbury (2003), who noted that the few literary abstracts she investigated seemed to have a topiceargumenteconclusion
structure. She also stated that the LRA has a “liminal status” compared to research reports from other fields of science. The
scarcity of research on LRA abstracts and their perceived generic status already justify research interest in them.
Literary research journals constitute international fora for academic exchange for an intellectually diverse readership
consisting of scholars and teachers of literature and feature primarily previously unpublished articles. The articles are
theoretically engaged and historically informed texts that address significant topics related to, for example, literary theory,
method, interpretation, genre(s), style, censorship, history, or interdisciplinarity. Authors present findings clearly, cogently
and concisely to enhance the communicative effectiveness of their articles. The discipline is highly divergent and has
numerous schools of thought, so the question emerges how literature scholars document their research endeavors in a
convergent genre like the abstract.
Unlike in the case of abstracts in several other fields of study, valid and reliable empirical evidence is unavailable on the
move structure of LRA abstracts, the rhetorical functions performed by their moves, and the linguistic realization of the moves
in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns, syntactic complexity and lexical richness. The present study was motivated by the
lack of information on these rhetorical structure and linguistic features of LRA abstracts.
2. Literature review
2.1. Research article text abstract typology
As opposed to graphical abstracts, text abstracts written by scholars form two groups in terms of format: structured and
traditional abstracts. Regarding rhetorical goals, they can be descriptive, informative, or indicative-informative.
Traditional abstracts consist of a block paragraph entitled Abstract. Structured abstracts have sub-headed sections and
typically occur in natural or social science journals. Research has suggested that structured abstracts are superior because of
their extended length, increased readability and searchability, and information content (Hartley, 1999). However, they have
been also found to feature confusing typesetting, have space-inefficient layout, and therefore miss important information
because of the restrictions imposed by the publisher (Hartley & Benjamin, 1998; Taddio et al., 1994). In contrast, traditional
abstracts dominate in social sciences and humanities and have been researched extensively. However, few descriptive studies
evaluate traditional abstracts critically in terms of their effectiveness: as an exception, Santos (1996) noted that because some
applied linguistic abstracts made only vague references to implications and conclusions, readers could not determine the
usefulness of the articles. The communicative effectiveness of abstracts in general, and of LRA abstracts in particular, should
be more extensively studied.
Text abstracts can be descriptive or informative. The descriptive abstract is not summative; does not discuss methodology/
results; has an impersonal style; and uses primarily present tense, passive voice and third-person reference forms. The
informative abstract is a condensed version of the entire RA, uses primarily past tense, active voice, and self-reference (Day,
1988; Goldbort 2002; Liddy, 1991; NISO 1997). According to Cremmins (as cited in Cross & Oppenheim, 2006), these two
abstract types can mix and form an indicative-informative abstract that combines descriptive abstract content with con-
clusions. Because LRA abstracts were described as transitional (Stotesbury, 2003), it raises the question which abstract type
the discipline prefers and why?
Discourse analytical investigations have sought to map the textual organization of traditional RA abstracts in terms of
moves realized by functional components (e.g., steps, sub-moves, or strategies). A review of the literature on abstracts reveals
that some original empirical research studies are available on the RA abstracts in mainstream literature that specifically
address both the question of canonical rhetorical structure, described in the form of conventional and optional constituents
(see Table 1), and lexico-grammar, but no such study on the LRA abstracts seems to be available.
Lore
!s (2004) provided a new analytical angle by comparing the rhetorical structure of abstracts to that of a whole article
(IntroductioneMethodseResultseDiscussion/IMRD structure) or of an article introduction (Swales, 1990 CARS structure).
According to her, the IMRD structure matches the definition of the informative abstract; the descriptive abstract, which does
not discuss methodology, reproduces the CARS structure; and the mixed-structure abstract corresponds with the descriptive-
informative abstract. Her mapping may be debatable at the level of steps in the CARS model. Methodology in some disciplines
is discussed in Move 3, Step 1B (Announcing Present Research) as some of Swales' (1990) examples suggest (see, e.g., the
!
outline structure on p. 165 in Genre Analysis) or as Arvay and Tanko! (2004) have shown in their analysis of theoretical RA
introductions (see M3 S1C Analytical Details in their revised CARS model, pp. 79e80). Nevertheless, this analytical angle is
also relevant for the study of LRA abstracts as it is not known which abstract type literary scholars use.
2.2. Rhetorical moves
A move is a stretch of text with a definable rhetorical function (Swales & Feak, 2009). Researchers considered it con-
ventional and therefore obligatory if it appeared in 50% (Holmes, 1997; Nwogu, 1997; Swales, 1990), in 60% (Kanoksilapatham,
44 G. Tanko
! / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 27 (2017) 42e55
Table 1
Summary of the move types reported in original RAs with move status indicated.
Study Field/genre Move structure

Salager-Meyer Medical RA Purposec, Resultsc, Conclusionsc, Problem Statemento, Recommendationso
(1990) Review Article Objectives (Sub-move: Corpus)c, Resultsc, Conclusionc, Recommendationsc
Case Report Case Presentationc, Findingsc, Comment on the Casec, Problem Statemento, Suggestiono
Liddy (1991) Education, Behavioral Sciences, Backgroundo, Purposec, Methodologyc, Resultsc, Conclusionsc, Appendiceso
& Mental Health RA
Santos (1996) Applied Linguistics RA Situating the ResearchSM, c, Presenting the ResearchSM, c, Methodologyc, Resultso, DiscussionSM
Huckin (2001) Biomedicine RA Purposeo, Methodc, Resultsc, Conclusionsc
Cross and Protozoology RA Backgroundo, Purposeo, Methodologyc, Resultsc, Discussion (Conclusion SM, c, Recommendations
SM, o
Oppenheim )
(2006)
Pho (2008) Applied Linguistics, & Situating the Researcho, Presenting the Researchc, Methodologyc, Resultsc, Discussing the
Educational Technology RA Researcho
Tseng (2011) Applied Linguistics RA Backgroundo, Aimc, Methodc, Resultsc, Conclusiono
Diani (2014) Linguistics Situating the ResearchSM, c, Presenting the Researchc, SM, Methodologyc, Resultso, DiscussionSM
Hatzitheodorou Law 1a. Territory: area of research SM, o, 1b. Reporting Previous Research (RPR): citations SM, o, 2a. Gap:
(2014) problem, issue SM, c, 2b. Goal: purpose of the study, research questions SM, c, 2c. Method:
participants, materials and procedures SM, c, 3a. Results/Discussion: discussing the findings or the
arguments on the issue SM, c, 3b. Importance claim: so what? SM, o, 3c. Suggestions for further
research: future directions SM, o
Business 1a. Territory: area of research SM, c, 1b. Reporting Previous Research (RPR): citations SM, o, 2a. Gap:
problem, issue SM, o, 2b. Goal: purpose of the study, research questions SM, c, 2c. Method:
participants, materials and procedures SM, c, 3a. Results/Discussion: discussing the findings or the
arguments on the issueSM, c, 3b. Importance claim: so what? SM, c, 3c. Suggestions for further
research: future directions SM, o
c ¼ conventional; o ¼ optional; SM ¼ move realized by sub-moves.
2005), in 66% (Hatzitheodorou, 2014), in 90% (Santos, 1996), or in 100% (Cross & Oppenheim, 2006; Tseng, 2011) of the
investigated instances of a genre. This variation shows that researchers have interpreted move stability criteria differently.
However, the analyst using such frequency of occurrence values must exercise caution: If a low value is set, peripheral and
prototypical instances of the genre cannot be distinguished (cf. Paltridge, 1997). Contrarily, the choice of a high value does not
allow for the generic variation, and consequently a less typical specimen of the genre may not be recognized as an instance of
the genre. Arguably, move stability criteria should be set in conformity with the characteristic features of the discourse
community (e.g., how dynamically it changes, Barton, 1994; or how close-knit it is, Bex, 1996; Hyland, 2000) whose genres are
investigated. Caution is especially needed when a new genre is analyzed and also in the case of an analysis of the LRA abstract
which, as discussed in Section 3.1, is a relatively young genre and which, as a result, may not yet have a distinct set of pro-
totypical features.
In genres with hierarchical structure, moves are realized by smaller conventional and optional discourse units. Such units
can be 'steps' (Hyland, 2004; Santos, 2002; Swales, 1990) 'rhetorical strategies' (Bhatia, 1993; Martín-Martín, 2003), 'stra-
tegies' (Henry & Roseberry, 1997, 2001), 'slots' (Nwogu, 1997), 'sub-moves' (Nwogu, 1991; Santos, 1996), or 'stages' (Bhatia,
2001). As in the case of moves, the frequency and type of these lower-level constituents can be an indicator of authorial
rhetorical concerns. Given that these constituents realize specific rhetorical goals, their rate of occurrence indicates the
prominence of authorial objectives. Although abstracts with hierarchical structures have been identified, it is unknown if LRA
abstracts are hierarchically structured.
Research has established that moves occur in regular patterns determined by propositional content. It has also been noted
that in specific genres and disciplines (Flowerdew, 2005; Holmes, 1997; Swales, 2004) writers modify the order of the moves,
and, typically in longer genres (Dudley-Evans, 1994; Hopkins & Dudley-Evans, 1988; Swales, 1990), they use them not only in
composite but cyclical configurations, forming Movex e Movey e Movex patterns. However, little research evidence is
available about move cycling in abstracts. Hyland (2004), for example, encountered it in longer than average abstracts as did
Santos (1996), who considered it an acceptable if idiosyncratic authorial attempt to perform unconventional rhetorical acts.
The investigation of this phenomenon is warranted because it can break the logical flow of ideas (Cross & Oppenheim, 2006;
Salager-Meyer, 1990).
Moves appear independently or combine to varying degrees within the boundaries of one sentence, forming an embedded
move. Partial embedding occurs when the boundaries of two or more moves that occur within one sentence coincide with
syntactic unit boundaries. Full embedding occurs when the move boundaries do not coincide with syntactic unit boundaries.
Some researchers simply acknowledged the existence of such moves (Douglas, Connor, & Upton 2007); others also discussed
their effects. Bhatia (1993), for example, stated that embedding combined with syntactic order reversal made moves difficult
to recognize. Cross and Oppenheim (2006) and Santos (1996) noted that move embedding resulted in information loss. Given
that it affects communicative effectiveness, more research is needed on embedded moves especially in such summative
genres as abstracts.
Writers can also make idiosyncratic choices at the level of syntax. Santos (1996) and Bhatia (1993) reported instances of
syntactic order reversal (e.g., sentence initial non-finite clauses) in embedded moves throughout abstracts, which resulted
G. Tanko
in a grammatically varied but potentially less coherent and therefore less easily processable text. Variation was also found
in tense choices. Santos (1996) and Pho (2008) found that whereas the tense typical of the Results move in applied lin-
guistics abstracts was the past tense, some writers used the present tense. Santos saw this as a “bold attempt to imply that
the research reported has yielded indisputable, established knowledge” (p. 494). Therefore, the grammatical realization of
the moves can also affect the impression made upon the reader and is an aspect to be investigated in the case of LRA
abstracts.
Although syntactic and lexical analysis can provide useful information about a genre, to the best of my knowledge, the
lexico-grammatical features of abstracts have not been investigated in relation to syntactic complexity or lexical richness.
Syntactic complexity can be described in terms of the variety and degree of sophistication of grammatical structures in a text
(Ortega, 2003). Lexical richness is typically described in terms of lexical density, the proportion of content words to the total
number of words in a text; lexical sophistication, the proportion of less frequently used or advanced words; and lexical
variation, the proportion of content words to the total number of content words (Read, 2000).
Finally, the rhetorical concerns of the author may also affect the text space allocated to a move. As Givo! n's code quantity
principle states (1985), there is a proportional relation between the importance of information and the amount of code that
expresses it. Such a relationship was observed by Holmes (1997), who defined the prominence of a move as the function of the
number of sentences it contained. Cross and Oppenheim (2006) estimated the importance of a move similarly: they expressed
in percentages the size of the text space allocated to moves. They reported that a conventional move used up more than 25% of
the text space in protozoology abstracts. Finally, Tanko! (2005) used number of words as an index of argumentative essay move
salience.
The potential use of text space as a move stability criterion requires further examination as it can complement the fre-
quency of occurrence move stability estimates.
The review presented above informs and justifies this empirical study the main goals of which are to identify the move
structure of the LRA abstract, define the functions and describe the linguistic characteristics of the moves, and determine the
type of abstract typical of LRAs. Therefore, the study aims to answer the following research questions:
A. Rhetorical structure analysis

1. What rhetorical moves occur in literature research article abstracts?
2. What are the characteristic features of the moves?
B. Linguistic analysis
3. What are the typical lexico-grammatical features of the moves in literature research article abstracts?
4. What characterises the syntactic complexity and lexical richness of the abstracts?
3. Methodology
3.1. The corpus and historical background of the LRA abstract
The corpus analyzed consists of LRA abstracts (RA titles and authors’ names excluded) selected from high impact factor
international journals (Table 2) which publish LRAs but which provide no instructions about the content and structure of
abstracts in their guidelines for authors.
The emergence of the LRA abstract helps outline its discourse situation. Consequently, in addition to the background
information provided in Appendix A, a brief account of its inception is given here.
The earliest mention of a literary abstract I found was in the May 1968 issue of PMLA (“For Members Only section”), which
contains the MLA “Guidelines for abstracting scholarly articles” (p. 459). The guide instructs authors to submit informative
abstracts for the MLA abstract system, except for cases when an indicative abstract is the only option, and contains explicit
content and style related instructions. However, unlike most journals in other disciplines, PMLA does not provide specifi-
cations on abstracts for its authors today because, as the editors of PMLA explained, abstracts vary relative to the article
content (e-mail communication).
Table 2
LRA abstract corpus.
Journal Period Tokens Abstracts % of corpus X tokens/abstract

New Literary History 2013 Sum. 4.990 31 24.88 161.29
2006 Win.
Shakespeare Quarterly 2013 Fall 6.841 35 34.11 194.23
2011 Spr.
PMLA 2014 Jan. 4.633 32 23.10 144.88
2011 Oct.
Modern Fiction Studies 2013 Win. 3.590 37 17.90 96.81
2012 Fall
Total 20.054 135 100
46 G. Tanko
Of the four journals, only PMLA has been publishing abstracts since 1968, albeit in a separate section of the hard copy
edition of the journal. The other journals did not require authors to submit abstracts even when they were added to the
Project Muse online database. Abstracts were only requested later in the early 2000s by Johns Hopkins University Press. They
serve indexing purposes (e-mail communication) and can be accessed online, but they do not appear on the first page of the
published research articles. Therefore, although today the literary abstract is a required and practiced genre, it seems to have a
different status than abstracts in other disciplines.
Some of the reasons for the authorial or editorial resistance to abstracts in LRAs are revealed in the “Abstract rumblings”
section of the MLA guidelines. The analysts who studied abstracts submitted in 1968e69 criticized them for their problematic
information content and questioned their suitability to substitute the RA. One of them accused a fellow professional of
criticising abstracts without having read the RAs, which may indicate that at the time the abstract was perceived as an integral
part of a RA rather than a stand-alone version of it.
The birth of the LRA abstract was surrounded by heated discussion and the abstract appears to have been perceived
initially as controversial and unnecessary rather than as an efficient tool for communication, which may explain some of the
initial reluctance of literary journals to request abstracts. This unsettled discourse situation may have changed because today
abstracts are submitted for all the four journals. Therefore, their investigation has become timely not only for the benefit of
LRA authors but also for students of literature who, in the absence of specifications, may look at LRA abstracts as models to be
followed when they write their theses.
3.2. Move analysis
3.2.1. Identification of the moves

The structure of randomly selected abstracts (n ¼ 12) was analyzed top-down to construct a preliminary move structure
model (Fig. 1) for the analysis. The author and their 11 MA students attending a written discourse analysis course read the
abstracts independently and divided them into sections based on the information content and perceived communicative
purposes: each shift in topic or communicative purpose, even if this occurred mid-sentence, was marked as a boundary
between sections. The sections identified and their boundaries were compared, discussed and finalized if a consensus was
found (i.e., if 8 or more readers agreed). Functional definitions were drafted and labels describing communicative function
were assigned to each section, that is, to each rhetorical move.
Following this coarse-grained analysis, each of the remaining abstracts in the corpus was coded twice by the author with
a difference of one month between the codings (Cohen's Kappa ¼ 0.981, SPSS 20.0). The analytical unit was the clause
because the sentence did not allow for a satisfactorily fine-grained analysis. Following the analysis of the entire corpus, the
preliminary move structure was revised with the inclusion of a newly identified move (Niche) and the moves were
renamed to better reflect their functions or to shorten them (Fig. 1). The functional definitions were used to identify text
segments with identical communicative functions in the abstract corpus. For a sample move structure analysis see
Appendix B. Next, the systematically recurring linguistic features of the moves were identified using various computational
tools.
3.2.2. Software-driven analysis

A sub-corpus excluding fully embedded moves was constructed for each move type. The sub-corpora were first subjected
to a bottom-up software analysis with WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012). Word frequency lists were created for each move
type sub-corpus and the most frequent content words were further analyzed using the Concordance module of the software
to identify recurrent patterns.
Preliminary move structure model Revised move structure model
M1 Announcing the Topic M1 Topic

M2 Stating Current Knowledge M2 Background
M3 Announcing Purpose M3 Niche
M4 Method M4 Purpose
M5 Outcome (Results/Findings) M5 Method
M6 Conclusion M6 Outcome
M7 Recommendation M7 Conclusion
M8 Implications
Fig. 1. Preliminary and revised move structure models.

G. Tanko
Each sub-corpus was then lemmatized and part-of-speech (POS) tagged with a text-annotating tool (Schmid, 1994) so that
it could be analyzed with syntactic and lexical complexity analyzer software (Lu, 2011, 2012). The POS tagged sub-corpora
were also analyzed with WordSmith Tools by setting the software to look for POS tags as search-words. This helped iden-
tify and quantify, for example, tense, voice, or pronoun use.
The syntactic complexity analyser software (Lu, 2011) was used to generate syntactic indices (i.e., clauses per sentence, or
types of clauses per sentence for this study). The lexical complexity analyser (Lu, 2012) was used to generate lexical
complexity indices and structure counts (e.g., sophisticated lexical word types, type-token ratios, or verb/adjective/adverb
variation), which were subsumed under the categories of lexical density (LD), lexical variation (LV), and lexical sophistication
(LS).
4. Results and discussion
This section first presents the structural characteristics of the moves. It continues with the exploration of the rhetorical
functions and salient lexico-grammatical features of each move. Finally, the syntactic complexity and lexical richness of the
moves are discussed.
4.1. Rhetorical move structure
4.1.1. Move frequency and invested rhetorical effort

Five frequent moves were identified (Table 3). This shows that LRA abstract writers assigned high priority to the purpose
and the outcomes of their research, to the methodology and to situating the study by either positioning it relative to
established knowledge frames or by announcing its thematic focus. Overall, this is in harmony with the MLA specifications
(which are here used for reference as the only relevant guidelines available) for the content of an informative LRA abstract.
However, drawing conclusions was a low priority rhetorical act, despite the contrary recommendations in the MLA guidelines.
It would seem that literary scholars were engaged in an autotelic activity. The limited rhetorical attention devoted to the
establishment of the relevance of a LRA can be explained with the disciplinary consensus about literature as a sub-field of the
humanities; namely, its scholarly impact is not to be measured in terms of socio-economic values and its aims are not to
generate universal laws like natural sciences or, like social sciences, to make sense of complex social reality. Its role is the
study of literary topics to understand them better and to engage in scholarly conversation about them by means of critical
reflection and cogent argumentation (Germano, 2008; Turabian, Williams, Colomb, & Booth, 2010).
Table 3 also shows the number of abstracts in which specific moves occurred. No move could have been considered
conventional if the move stability threshold had been set at 90% or higher (cf. Section 2.2). Those four moves that occurred in
more than half of the abstracts appear to be stable moves, which indicates that the abstracts do not have a high degree of
generic prototypicality. Consistently with the divergent nature of the discipline, literary scholars appear to be less convergent
in their discourse practices concerning abstracts. Because of this, in their case a more lenient move stability threshold had to
be used for the identification of typical rhetorical action.
The results of the analysis of the rhetorical efforts invested in individual moves also help reveal the salient moves: three
moves were allocated 79.98% of the text space (Table 4). Of these, Outcome took up more than twice the text space of Purpose
and Background combined, which indicates conventional move status (cf. Section 2.2). Method was allocated 8.30% of the
total text space, which is not surprising because the majority of LRAs are more theoretical than empirical in nature.
Furthermore, the move to text space ratio shows that Outcome and Background were frequent long moves, Purpose and
Method were frequent short moves. Although infrequent, when present, Conclusion was longer than the infrequent short
Topic, Niche, or Implications moves.
The move structure derived on the basis of the above analysis is an eight-move structure. This is quite similar to the
rhetorical structure of abstracts from other disciplines presented in Table 1. Based on frequency and text space criteria, the
Table 3
Occurrence of moves in LRA abstracts.
Move Move frequency Abstracts featuring a move
f % N %
Purpose 132 25.34 115 85.19
Outcome 129 24.76 118 87.41
Method 85 16.31 72 53.33
Background 78 14.97 74 54.81
Topic 58 11.13 58 42.96
Conclusion 20 3.84 20 14.81
Niche 16 3.07 15 11.11
Implications 3 0.58 3 2.22
Total 521 100
48 G. Tanko
Table 4
Text space per moves.a
Move Words % Cum. % Ind. move f to text space ratio

Outcome 8.660 44.33 44.33 68.19
Purpose 3.757 19.23 63.56 28.90
Background 3.208 16.42 79.98 43.35
Method 1.621 8.30 88.27 20.26
Topic 1.279 6.55 94.82 24.13
Conclusion 626 3.20 98.02 32.95
Niche 323 1.65 99.68 21.53
Implications 63 0.32 100.00 21
Total 19.537 100
a
The calculations are based on individual moves.
stable moves in LRA abstracts are those presenting the results and research goals. The research context and methodology
moves are moderately stable. Similarly to other soft disciplines, independent Niche and Implications moves are rare in LRA
abstracts. The most notable difference is the absence of sub-moves, which means that LRA abstracts have a non-hierarchical
structure. This may indicate that the LRA abstract is still in its early stages of evolution or that literary scholars do not consider
it necessary to use alternative rhetorical strategies for the realization of the same rhetorical goal.
4.1.2. Embedding and syntactic reversal in moves

The embedded moves identified in the abstracts expressed different rhetorical functions within one clause. Partially
embedded moves were frequent (n ¼ 131). Most involved two moves, but there were instances of three-move merges. Topic,
Method, and Background moves formed most of the fully embedded moves (n ¼ 20). No abstract contained more than one
fully embedded move. The fact that literary scholars did not overuse fully embedded moves may indicate their efforts to
reduce information loss and to produce a cohesive text (cf. Section 2.2).
The following example is the first sentence in an abstract that fully merges Topic (M1) and Method (M5):
(1) This article explores Ian McEwan's negotiation of the “two-culture” debate between literature and science {M1} in The
Child in Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997). {zM5} [A099].
The writer announces the topic of the research paper and provides information about the literary works that are used in
the analysis.
Instances of move order reversal also occurred. As in other genres (e.g., Bhatia, 1993), they resulted from syntactic order
reversal: within one sentence boundary, a main clause followed a nonfinite subordinate clause. The subordinate clause was
mostly a fronted participle clause with no subject. This is a less frequent clause order, whose function is to emphasize the
main clause containing the most important information (Quirk et al., 1985). In the following example, the end-focus is on
Purpose:
(2) Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance” to an exemplary conjunction of philosophy and literature,
{M5} this essay proposes that Beckett's works are less aporetic scenarios of deferral and undecidability than meticulous
representations of the largely unarticulated convergent behaviors constituting forms of life. {M4} [A096]
Santos (1996) proposed a different explanation for embedding and syntactic reversal, namely that they signal the author's
effort to “compete for the attention of a busy readership” (p. 492). However, a plausible alternative explanation could be that
the abstract is a summary and the entailed requirement for information maximization results in the realization of several
communication goals per one syntactic unit (Tanko ! , 2016) and in the foregrounding of some of these by syntactic means.
4.1.3. Move cycles

Four abstracts contained move cycles of which two had two cycles each. The moves that formed cycles were Topic,
Purpose, Method, Outcome, and Background. Cycles occurred primarily in longer than average abstracts. They were not
characteristic of LRA abstracts but rather idiosyncratic. Their relative absence is probably due to the brevity of abstracts (cf.
Swales, 1990) or may indicate literature scholars’ appreciation of coherent discourse, which is also confirmed by the move
sequence findings.
4.1.4. Move sequences

A typical LRA abstract contained 3 (f ¼ 41) or 4 (f¼35) moves. No exceptionally frequent move sequence types were found.
Abstracts with several (n " 6) moves were rare (n ¼ 10).
The analysis of typical move positions provides further insights. A typical LRA abstract opened with background infor-
mation or a statement of the topic/purpose and closed with the results or purpose statement. When present, Conclusion was
G. Tanko
the last move (n ¼ 19) and Implications closed two and was the penultimate move in one abstract because of syntactic
reversal.
The typical order of the moves in a LRA abstract based on the move sequence patterns identified in the corpus can be
described as follows:
M1=M2 # M3 # M4=M5 # M6 # M7=M8
Like the relative absence of move cycling, this move order indicates a distinct preference for a logical presentation of
information in the LRA abstracts.
Based on the combination of the findings form the last four sections, the textual organization of LRA abstracts is the
following:
½ðTopicÞ and=or Background' þ ½ðNicheÞ' þ ½Purpose and=or Method' þ ½Outcome'

þ ½ðConclusionÞ and=or ðImplicationsÞ'
The bracketed elements and plus signs between them describe the typical order of the functional units, the parentheses
indicate less frequently present and therefore minimally stable moves, and the moves typeset in bold show long moves.
The main features of the moves are summarized in Fig. 2.
4.2. The functions and the linguistic characteristics of moves
4.2.1. Topic (M1)

This move introduces the topic of the RA and provides bibliographic information, as in:
(3) This essay examines the role of fla

^nerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. [A073]
Therefore, functionally M1 overlaps with M1 (Establishing a territory) Steps 1 (Claiming centrality), 2 (Topic generaliza-
tions), or 3 (Reviewing previous research) in the CARS model (Swales, 1990).
In this move, the LRA was typically thematized with 'essay', which may indicate that the authors perceived their work as
an expression of their viewpoint in the form of a theoretical paper, and sometimes by 'article' as the syntactic subjects.
Whereas the use of inanimate subjects with active verbs has been found in research articles (Master, 1991; 2001; Swales,
Implications (M8)
Background (M2)
Conclusion (M7)
Outcome (M6)
Purpose (M4)
Method (M5)
Move type
Niche (M3)
Topic (M1)
Move feature
infrequent, long - - - - - - + -
infrequent, short + - + - - - - +
frequent, long - + - - - + - -
frequent, short - - - + + - - -
predominantly stable - - - + - + - -
moderately stable - + - - + - - -
not stable + - + - - - + +
opens abstract +f +f - +o +i - - -
co-occurs with M2f,1 M1i,2 M2i,2 M5f,1,2 M6 f,1 M7o,1 M8i,1 M6i,2,M7i,2
position(s) 1f ,2i 1f,2o,3o,4i 2f 1i,2f,3f 1i,2f,3f 3f,4f,5f 3i,7f 7i
closes abstract - +i - +f +i +f +o +i
independent +o +f +i +f +i +f +i -
partially embedded +o +o - M5f,2 M4f M5i,2 +i +i
fully embedded +o +o +i +o +o +o +i -
forms move cycle +i +i - +i +i +i - -
Fig. 2. LRA abstract move features. Occurrence indicators: f ¼ frequent, o ¼ occasional, i ¼ infrequent; Move co-occurrence indicators: 1 ¼ is the first move,
2 ¼ follows a move; Move position indicators: 1 ¼ first of 8 possible positions/abstract.
50 G. Tanko
1990), especially in abstract inanimate subject and active verb combinations (Master, 2001), in LRA abstracts some attempts
at setting the scientific tone resulted in an inanimate subject performing an unlikely action, as in:
(4) This article interrogates representations of time in the novels of Sam Taylor. [A128] (emphasis added)
This feature of the abstracts is not in harmony with the careful language work that characterizes the abstracts overall. It
may indicate the literary scholars’ inexperience with the use of impersonal style.
The onset of the move was typically signaled with the sentence initial this essay/article þ present tense verb structure,
which has an immediacy effect expressing that the LRA is not a documentation of past research. Occasionally, the author was
thematized (i.e., I, my, we, the author) contrary to the MLA guidelines, but present tense and active voice dominated the move,
in which respect the LRA abstracts followed the guidelines.
4.2.2. Background (M2)

The move provides general information about the topic to situate the research issue in the wider context of literary studies.
It is signaled by the pronounced emphasis on the LRA subject matter and characterized by the prevalence of present tense,
which may indicate an aim to accentuate research topic currency. It frequently opened the abstract; therefore, it functionally
overlaps with M1 and with M1 (Establishing a territory; Steps 1, 2, 3) in the CARS model.
The presence of this move and of the direct quotations does not match the MLA guidelines, which stipulates that “gen-
eralizations (i.e., ‘Romanticism flourished in the 19th century’), background information, and, ordinarily, references to pre-
vious work” (p. 459) or direct quotations must not appear in informative abstracts.
Given that the move often contained knowledge-claim-like statements, it is noteworthy that except for one instance the
authors did not relate the statements to identifiable sources as if they considered such an act of validation unnecessary, as in:
(5) The handkerchief in Othello has widely been assumed to be white. [A035]
In a few cases, unspecific attributions (e.g., critics, scholars, scholarship, scholarly consensus) were found. Furthermore,
present perfect passive verb forms were also frequent, as in:
(6) Much has been written about hearing in Hamlet. [A059]
It seems that the members of the literary discourse community identify theirs as a high-context culture (Hall, 1976) in
which less information is to be coded in abstracts to activate shared internalized information.
4.2.3. Niche (M3)

This move creates a place for the research paper and functionally matches M2 (Establishing a niche) in the CARS model.
The strategies used were research gap indication, counter claiming, question raising, or fresh appraisal of earlier research. The
last strategy is illustrated with the example:
(7) This turn to religion suggests a renewed interest in the anthropological underpinnings of Shakespeare's plays. It also
suggests a new approach to the idea of the modern in literary history. [A028]
The infrequency of the move indicates that few authors considered the creation of a niche necessary. This concurs with the
MLA guidelines, which does not endorse this rhetorical act. Even those authors who made this rhetorical effort rarely per-
formed a confrontational rhetorical act. The (animate) agents because of whom the existing body of research suffers from
limitations were absent. This may show that literary scholars do not consider abstracts the site for intense scholarly debate.
Some of the linguistic signals of gap indication were phrases like have received less attention, overlooked a crucial aspect of
or does not yet exist and adversative connectors. The present perfect tense occurred more frequently than the present simple
tense#arguably to emphasize the effect of a past action.
4.2.4. Purpose (M4)

The move announces the authors’ aims by stating theses or outlining goals and using the present simple tense, as in:
(8) In this essay, Gjesdal takes issue with this assumption. [A038]
It functionally resembles M2 (Occupying the niche), Step 1A (Outlining purposes) in the CARS model.
According to the MLA guidelines, this rhetorical act should be performed in the ‘topic sentence’ (p. 459) of the abstract, but
given that the typical position for this move is 2 or 3 (cf. Fig. 2), the authors' practice, quite rightly, does not reflect the
specification.
G. Tanko
Although article was frequently the syntactic subject, self-reference reappeared (I, my, we, the authors) in this move. Some
authors used their names probably to establish an objective tone while thematizing themselves. Such references are spe-
cifically discouraged in the MLA guidelines.
4.2.5. Method (M5)

In accordance with the MLA guidelines, this move, like M2 (Occupying the niche), Step 1B (Announcing present research)
in the CARS model, provides procedural information about the investigation, as in:
(9) Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, historicist, and formalist methodologies, …[A 111]
The move was frequently signaled by a fronted participle clause and the present tense was used. Occasionally self-mention
(I, my) also occurred, and some authors used their names, giving a third person point of view account.
4.2.6. Outcome (M6)

This move presents the outcomes of the research in the form of descriptive summative statements of the main or most
interesting ideas and rarely in the form of a straightforward outline of the main ideas organized as they feature in the RA,
which is what should characterize all informative abstracts according to the MLA guidelines. It therefore has the same
function as M2 (Occupying the niche), Step 2 (Announcing principal findings) in the CARS model.
The move is characterized by the use of present tense with infrequent instances of passive voice forms. A few self-
mentions (I, my or the author's name) occurred, but most syntactic subjects were inanimate. However, the largest cate-
gory of subjects featured proper noun-verb combinations (e.g., Eliot invokes, The Grapes of Wrath … seems) and common nouns
denoting the objects of the analysis followed by a verb (e.g., the novel inaugurates).
This move type contained a large number of linking devices. These were rendered necessary by the length and by the
syntactic and conceptual complexity of the move: the explicitation was most likely intended to facilitate information pro-
cessing. In many cases, this move did not show “the meaningful, coherent relationship between the author's ideas and ar-
guments” as specified in the MLA guidelines because it presented highlights from the LRA rather than “a succinct
condensation of what the article says” (p. 459).
4.2.7. Conclusion (M7)

This move rounds up the abstract with a final summative comment directly related to the research problem raised in
Purpose or Topic/Background, as in:
(10) Biovalue in Butler's posthumanist vision, I conclude, inheres in the moral enhancement of Shori and is the result of her
multispecies citizenship. [A121]
The move is characterized by the use of the simple present tense and a higher level of specificity than Purpose or Topic. It
seems to function as the thesis specified in the MLA guidelines. In the few instances identified, the authors were thematized,
and the onset was signaled with conclusion indicators. Given the low frequency of the move, contrary to the MLA guidelines,
it seems that literature scholars do not consider this rhetorical act important.
4.2.8. Implications (M8)

The last move formulates recommendations for future research or highlights the practical significance of the research
outcomes, as in:
(11) In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as
Ge!rard Genette and Garrett Stewart. [A070]
It is the least frequent move and when present, it was realized in the present tense. As the example shows, it only an-
nounces rather than briefly restates the gist of what is recommended.
To summarize the findings discussed in this section, the description of the characteristic features of the moves shows that
the LRA abstract is written primarily in the present tense, with a functional shift to the present prefect tense in M3 (Niche).
Active and middle voice use dominates. The ascribing of knowledge-claims to researchers, the establishment of a research
niche, and direct confrontation with other researchers are uncommon. The thematization of inanimate subjects is frequent,
and the most frequent and stable moves also feature varying instances of self-mention, which shows an insecure use of
scientific tone. Most of the moves have overt signals, which helps their identification.
In terms of rhetorical organization, the LRA abstract overlaps more with the CARS model. Contrary to the MLA guidelines,
which seems to have little currency today, it is not the reproduction of the gist of the RA. Furthermore, in terms of typological
membership, the LRA abstract seems to be a mix of the descriptive and informative abstracts, with markedly more of the
descriptive abstract features. First, present tense use dominates. LRA abstracts help the reader understand the general nature
and scope of the research by providing information about the topic, background, and main points made, but they do not
52 G. Tanko
summarize the RA and consequently cannot effectively substitute it. There is no systematic reproduction of the gist of the
outcome or conclusions, and the authors use third-person reference and a detached style with varying success. However,
uncharacteristically of descriptive abstracts, passive voice was found to be infrequent. A few moves were also quite infor-
mative, and therefore the abstracts may be useful for literary scholars, which feature, in addition to the move types, makes
them similar to informative abstracts. Moreover, like informative abstract writers, LRA abstract authors also used self-
reference and active voice, albeit often with inanimate subject and animate verb combinations. It seems that the attempt
of the MLA guidelines to prescribe the use of informative abstracts failed. The reasons for this may be that the specifications
are old, occasionally illogical (cf. Section 4.2.4), no more upheld by PMLA or the MLA abstract system, or that the practices of
literary scholars are not the logical positivistic ones that MLA seems to have attempted to endorse.
4.3. Syntactic complexity
Most abstracts consisted of 4e5 sentences (X ¼ 4.91, þx ¼ 5.00, Mo ¼ 4.00, SD ¼ 2.00), which matches humanities journal
abstract findings, but the average LRA abstract had fewer sentences than natural sciences abstracts (Orasan, 2001). Sentence
length ranged between 3 and 81 words (X ¼ 30.23, Mo ¼ 24, SD ¼ 13.26). Half of the sentences (50.2%) contained 16e35
words, 12.8% had 45-81, and 2.3% ten or fewer words. This shows that compared to linguistics and natural sciences, where an
average 24e27 words/sentence was the norm (Holtz, 2011; Orasan, 2001), the LRA abstracts contained longer sentences.
The clause length per move indices (Table 5) show that Method contained the longest clauses, which explains the lower
clause counts in this move sub-corpus. The reverse holds for Purpose and Outcome.
It can be concluded, therefore, that LRA abstracts contain fewer but longer sentences in comparison with abstracts in other
disciplines. This made the abstracts grammatically complex, given that sentence length is an indicator of syntactic complexity
(Biber & Conrad, 2009). LRA abstract authors do not follow the MLA guidelines, which suggests that authors should not write
overlong or complex sentences.
4.4. Lexical richness
The lexical richness of the moves was determined with three measures: lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical
variation. The lexical density (LD) indices were above 0.5 for each move sub-corpus (Table 6). Because this index shows “how
closely packed the information is” (Halliday, 1985: 66), LRA abstracts can be considered texts with high information content.
This is reinforced by the LD indices generated with the same software for 50 high-rated academic summaries and 50 high-
rated argumentative essays written by students. The average LD values were 0.50 for the summaries and 0.46 for the essays
(Tanko! , 2016). The fact that the indices of the move corpora are higher than the index calculated for summaries shows that the
abstracts are lexically dense.
Lexical sophistication (LS) (cf. Laufer, 1994) indices ranged between 0.33 and 0.63 for the move sub-corpora (Table 6).
Given that the average LS indices calculated for the above described sets of student scripts were 0.33 for summaries and 0.27
Table 5
Number and mean length of clauses.
Move sub-corpora Clauses X length in words

M6 Outcome 721 12.23
M4 Purpose 346 11.11
M2 Background 233 14.11
M1 Topic 101 13.03
M5 Method 99 16.97
M7 Conclusion 56 11.36
M3 Niche 27 12.11
M8 Implications 5 13.00
Total 1.558 X length ¼ 12.56
Table 6
Lexical richness of the moves.
Move Lexical Move Lexical Soph. Move Lexical

Density Var.
Topic 0.57 Outcome 0.63 Niche 41.40
Background 0.56 Background 0.55 Background 39.60
Method/Purpose 0.55 Purpose 0.55 Conclusion 39.20
Outcome 0.53 Method 0.53 Purpose 38.30
Implications 0.52 Topic 0.52 Outcome 38.20
Concl., Niche 0.51 Conclusion 0.41 Method 36.70
Niche, Implic. 0.33 Topic 36.10
G. Tanko
for essays (Tanko ! , 2016), most of the indices reported for the move corpora show a high level of lexical sophistication in the
abstracts. These findings demonstrate that LRA abstracts contain mostly advanced vocabulary.
Finally, the lexical variation (LV) indices were calculated for each move sub-corpus. Because this measure is sensitive to
word count, the mean number of different words from 10 random 50-word sequences selected by the software (Lu, 2012)
from each move sub-corpus was used in the analysis. Given the small size of the sub-corpus, Implications was excluded from
this analysis. The indices for the sub-corpora were above 0.36. As a comparison, the average LV indices calculated for the
summaries and essays were, respectively, 38.46 and 37.96 (Tanko ! , 2016), which is almost identical with the lexical variation in
the abstracts.
Based on the above findings, LRA abstracts contain fewer but longer sentences than abstracts in other disciplines, which
shows that their syntactic complexity is high. This also provides an explanation for the presence of embedded moves in the
corpus and highlights the functional complexity of the sentences in rhetorical terms. Furthermore, LRA abstracts are lexically
dense texts and contain advanced vocabulary consisting of low frequency words. The combination of complex grammatical
structures with the preference for syntactic order reversal, the high information content, and the use of non-frequent words
makes LRA abstracts rather difficult to process. This is consistent with the comments made by the proficient English speaker
MA students who were involved in the initial coding process that they found the abstracts linguistically difficult. Arguably, the
level of elaboration may even affect the communicative potential of the part-genre.
5. Conclusion
This study makes a number of theoretical, research methodological and pedagogical contributions directly to genre
analysis and thereby to EAP. First, because the LRA abstract as a genre has not been analyzed and defined by genre analysts,
this study constitutes a first genre analysis of an undocumented genre from a divergent discipline. As such, it contributes to
the expanding body of formal, thematic and social usage knowledge on genres.
The methodology used in the research is innovative with respect to the tools previously used by analysts for the identi-
fication of typical rhetorical action. The study provides evidence that move stability criteria defined with arbitrarily set
frequency of occurrence values may be counterproductive. It shows that a traditional measure like the frequency of occur-
rence value can be effectively augmented by the code quantity principle for the identification of salient rhetorical acts.
Moreover, it also demonstrates that a conventional lexico-grammatical analysis can be reliably enhanced with computational
syntactic complexity and lexical richness analyses.
The study is a critical analysis in the sense that it does not simply establish, for example, that LRA abstracts are indicative-
informative abstracts, but it also highlights their weakness and strengths. It therefore informs EAP pedagogy by drawing
attention to such teachable aspects as the linguistic tools available for effective move signaling and research space creation, or
the semantically acceptable use of middle voice as a self-reference avoidance technique in English academic prose. As such, it
is expected to be relevant primarily for literary scholars who publish and to EAP or literature teachers who train novice
literary scholars (e.g., BA, MA thesis writers) engaged in the process of mastering the craft of writing effective abstracts.
There are a number of limitations that need to be addressed. Due to the unavailability of lexical and syntactic complexity
data on abstracts in other disciplines, the complexity indices of LRA abstracts could not be compared to data on identical part-
genres, which would have probably made the comparisons more meaningful. As any discourse analytical study that focuses
only on the product of disciplinary communication, the findings of this study could have been validated and expanded with
interview data conducted with literary scholars.
Furthermore, whereas the abstracts selected from the four highest impact factor journals may illustrate the best disci-
plinary practice, such journals may not necessarily be the most appropriate or dynamic fora for capturing the true evolu-
tionary status of the LRA abstract. A larger corpus of abstracts from journals accessible to a wider authorship may provide
more accurate insights for genre analysts and for the users of the genre.
Although it seems to fit the expectations formulated in connection with indicative abstracts in the MLA guidelines, the
reduced rhetorical attention to Niche, Conclusion, and Implications would deserve further investigation. Interview studies
with LRA authors could be conducted to help better understand the disciplinary practices and expectations that shape this
part-genre. In future research it would probably also be worthwhile to expand the study to further journals in order to better
map the norms of the literary discourse community and the perceived functions of the LRA abstract in this discourse
community.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data related to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2017.04.003.
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ARTICLE Pho: Research article abstracts 231
Research article abstracts in applied

linguistics and educational technology:
a study of linguistic realizations of
rhetorical structure and authorial stance
Discourse Studies
Copyright © 2008
SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 10(2): 231–250
PHUONG DZUNG PHO 10.1177/1461445607087010
MONASH U N IVERSITY, AUSTRALIA
ABSTRACT The abstract found at the beginning of most journal articles has
increasingly become an essential part of the article. It tends to be the first part
of the article to be read and, to some extent, it ‘sells’ the article. Acquiring the
skills of writing an abstract is therefore important to novice writers to enter
the discourse community of their discipline. Based on 30 abstracts from three
journals, the present study aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves
of abstracts in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology,
but also the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different
abstract moves. The results show that there are three obligatory moves in
abstracts in these two disciplines – Presenting the research, Describing the
methodology, and Summarizing the results. The results also indicate that a
combination of certain linguistic features such as grammatical subjects, verb
tense and voice can help distinguish moves in the abstract. The findings of the
study have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for
graduate students, especially students from non-English backgrounds.
KEY WORDS: abstracts, authorial stance, genre analysis, linguistic features,

moves, research articles
1. Introduction
The abstract has increasingly become an essential part of the research article.
As it captures the essence of the whole article, the abstract tends to be the first
part of a journal article to be read (Hartley, 2003; Salager-Meyer, 1990); this is
especially true in today’s busy world flooded with information. Very few journals
would not require an abstract to be submitted with the main research article
(Martín-Martín, 2002). Many journals published in languages other than English
also require the submission of an English version of the abstract (Lorés, 2004;
Ventola, 1994). Abstracts are thus an important genre to study, for both reading
232 Discourse Studies 10(2)
and writing purposes. As Graetz (1985) pointed out more than 20 years ago,
it greatly enhances the comprehension of journal abstracts if readers can rec-
ognize the linguistic signals of the different functions of an abstract. And because
these signals provide a clear guidance to readers, writers can then communicate
their ideas more effectively. The knowledge of both the textual organization of
an abstract and the linguistic realizations of the global moves will be valuable
to novice writers such as graduate students (especially those from non-English
backgrounds) who intend to submit articles for publication (Ventola, 1994).
In addition to textual organization, Flowerdew (2001) also points out another
problem of non-native writers in writing articles for publication – the lack of
authorial voice.
Previous studies of research article abstracts have mainly focused on the
schematic structure of the abstract (e.g. Hyland, 2004). A few studies have also
attempted to investigate the linguistic features of abstracts or even link the lin-
guistic realizations with different moves of the abstract. However, each study
tends to focus on only one or two linguistic features of the abstract; for example,
apart from the generic structure of the abstract, Lorés (2004) also investigates
the thematic structure of the rhetorical moves; or Salager-Meyer (1992) examines
the distribution of modality and verb tenses across the different moves of the
abstract. Although the focus on certain features of interest in earlier work allows
in-depth investigation, a more comprehensive description of the linguistic real-
izations of abstract moves would give the novice writer a more global view of
the abstract.
Although some studies investigate abstracts from broad areas such as hu-
manities, social sciences and natural sciences (Graetz, 1985; Stotesbury, 2003a),
most studies examine abstracts in a specific discipline. For example, Anderson
and Maclean (1997), Busch-Lauer (1995a, 1995b), and Salager-Meyer (1990,
1992) focus on the discipline of medicine; Huckin (2001) on biomedicine; or
Hartley (2003) on psychology. The discipline of applied linguistics, one of the
disciplines of interest in the present study, has also been the subject of Hyland’s
(2004) and Santos’s (1996) studies. Hyland’s study compares the move structure
of abstracts across eight disciplines; one of those disciplines is applied linguistics.
On the other hand, Santos’s study focuses exclusively on the field of applied
linguistics. Although Santos also examines the distribution of a few linguistic
features such as verb tenses across moves, the main focus of his study is on the
move structure of abstracts in applied linguistics. Yet, as emphasized by Ventola
(1994), not only do novice writers need to know the global structure of the
abstract, they also need to know the conventional linguistic realizations of those
rhetorical functions.
As mentioned above, Flowerdew (2001) finds that authorial voice is also a
problem that novice writers have. The issue of authorial voice (i.e. expression of
the writer’s judgments or attitudes towards a proposition or an object) has not
been the focus of most previous studies of abstracts. There are a few studies on this
interpersonal aspect of the abstract in the literature, yet they focus on only one
or two expressions of authorial stance. For example, Hyland (2003) investigates
the use of self-reference and self-citation and Hyland and Tse’s studies (2005a,
Pho: Research article abstracts 233
2005b) examine authorial stance through the ‘evaluative that-construction’ in

abstracts from various disciplines. Stotesbury (2003a) studies authorial stance
through the use of evaluative words and in another study (Stotesbury, 2003b)
the use of personal pronouns in abstracts from several broad areas. However, the
possibility that authorial stance might differ across moves has not been fully
considered.
The present study thus aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves of
abstracts in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, but also
the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different abstract
moves.
2. Methodology
2.1 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CORPUS
A total of 30 research article abstracts were selected from three journals in the
areas of applied linguistics and educational technology: 10 from The Modern
Language Journal (MLJ), 10 from TESOL Quarterly (TQ) in the field of applied
linguistics, and 10 from Computers & Education (CE) in the field of educational
technology. These three journals were chosen as they have high impact factors
according to Journal Citation Reports (2005) and they are all related to the broad
field of teaching and learning.
Considering that the rhetorical structure and linguistic features of empirical
research articles can be very different from those of theoretical research articles,
only abstracts of data-based research articles were included in the corpus. The
collection of articles satisfying such criteria started from the most recent issue
of each journal accessible online at the time of data collection and stopped when
10 articles had been collected from each journal, resulting in a total of 30 articles.
All the articles in the corpus were published between 2005 and 2006.
2.2 APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF RHETORICAL STRUCTURE/MOVE STRUCTURE

A major problem in most studies of abstracts (and also in studies of research
articles following Swales’s, 1990, approach) is that the identification of moves
seems to be based on both a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach.
The description ‘bottom-up’ means that researchers distinguish moves on the
basis of certain linguistic signals. ‘Top-down’ means they do this on the basis
of content. For example, Anderson and Maclean (1997) identify the Conclusion
move of the medical abstract by signals such as present tense and certain nouns
and verbs. At the same time, they also rely on their intuitive interpretations of
content. They then point to those particular lexical and grammatical items as
characteristic of this move. This results in a circularity of the identification of
rhetorical moves and linguistic realizations.1 The two processes, bottom-up and
top-down, therefore, need to be separated. In the present study, the identification
of moves is based solely on the function or content of the text (i.e. using a top-
down approach). After the moves are identified, the typical linguistic features
in each move are investigated.
Santos’s (1996) model is used as the analytical framework for the rhet-
orical structure of the abstracts in the present study for two reasons. First, this
model has been applied to abstracts in applied linguistics, and it includes all the
moves identified in other studies of abstracts. Second, the labels of the five moves
(as shown in Table 1) are more meaningful than those in other studies such as
Introduction or Conclusion. However, unlike Santos’s study, the present study
does not divide the moves further into submoves. The subdivision of Move 1 and
Move 2 in Santos’s study of abstracts was mainly based on Swales’s (1990) CARS
model for the introduction section of the article with moves and submoves. Yet,
the submoves in this CARS model were not clearly distinguished, as admitted
by Swales (2004) himself in his latest version of the CARS model. The final
framework used for the present study is thus as given in Table 1.
Although this top-down approach, which is mainly based on content or
function through the asking of questions, can be criticized for its subjectivity
(see Paltridge, 1994), it can avoid the circularity of a combined approach of
function and form. Moreover, the subjectivity of the content-based approach
can be reduced if, as suggested by Crookes (1986), a satisfactory level of inter-
rater reliability can be obtained. Six randomly selected abstracts from the corpus
were thus coded by four different people (the researcher and three university
lecturers in linguistics and applied linguistics), yielding high inter-rater reliability
rates (over 90%).
Some previous researchers on rhetorical moves (e.g. Mizuta et al., 2004)
claimed that segments of text smaller than a clause should not be counted as
‘moves’. However, considering the fact that abstracts are very condensed texts,
such exclusion does not seem to be reasonable. Therefore, for the corpus of
TA B L E 1. A framework for abstract analysis
Moves Function/description Question asked

Move 1: Situating the Setting the scene for the What has been known about
research <STR> current research (topic the field/topic of research?
generalization)
Move 2: Presenting the Stating the purpose of the What is the study about?
research <PTR> study, research questions
and/or hypotheses
Move 3: Describing the Describing the materials, How was the research done?
methodology <DTM> subjects, variables,
procedures, . . .
Move 4: Summarizing Reporting the main What did the researcher find?
the findings <STF> findings of the study
Move 5: Discussing the Interpreting the results/ What do the results mean?
research <DTR> findings and/or giving So what?
recommendations,
implications/applications
of the study
research article abstracts in the present study, a move can be realized by struc-
tures ranging from several sentences to a phrase or a word, although the most
common realization of moves is in a sentence.
2.3 APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC REALIZATIONS OF MOVES AND AUTHORIAL

STANCE
An initial analysis of the linguistic features of the research article abstracts
was carried out to identify the features that have the potential of distinguishing
moves and indicating authorial stance. Linguistic features identified in previous
studies of research article abstracts as well as the research article proper (e.g.
Hyland, 1996, 2005; Kanoksilapatham, 2003; Vassileva, 2000, 2001) were
also taken into consideration. A list of linguistic features was then derived as
follows:
• Grammatical subjects (more details of the classification will be given
below)
• Verb tense and aspect
• Voice
• Modal auxiliaries and semi-modal verbs (e.g. may, can, should, have to)
• Epistemic adjectives, adverbs and nouns (e.g. likely, possible, probably, generally,
possibility, assumption, tendency, need)
• Attitudinal adjectives, adverbs and nouns (e.g. important, significant, sur-
prisingly, curiously, importance, significance)
• Self-reference words (e.g. I, we, my, our, the author(s), the researcher(s))
• Reporting verbs (e.g. suggest)
• That-complement clauses
The classification of grammatical subjects applied in the present study was
mainly based on MacDonald’s (1992, 1994) classification of grammatical
subjects, as these may give some insight into the linguistic realizations of moves
and authorial stance. Some later modifications of MacDonald’s model by Hemais
(2001) and Martínez (2003) with more detailed categorization of the epistemic
subjects were also taken into consideration.
• Phenomenal classes (i.e. what the researcher studies):
Class 1: Objects of research and their attributes (including nouns referring to
people or objects studied and their ‘attributes, properties, action, behaviour,
or motivations and thoughts’ (MacDonald, 1994: 158)): the participants in
the study, variables, these strategies, scores for the 3-criterion variables, . . .
• Epistemic classes (i.e. nouns ‘belonging to the researcher or referring to the
reasoning of academics’ (MacDonald, 1994: 158)
Class 2: Self-reference (including words referring to the author(s) of the paper
themselves): I, we, the author, the researcher, . . .
Class 3: Other-reference (including 4 subcategories: (3a) specific names of
other researchers or citations of the author’s own previous studies: Swales
(1985), . . .; (3b) previous research or studies in general without referring

to any specific researchers: previous researchers, previous studies, research in
the area, . . .; (3c) general topics in the field: listening comprehension, the dom-
inant approach to second language education, educators, ESL teachers, . . .; and
(3d) specific research objects or outcomes mentioned in previous research:
no clear definition of dropout from academic courses, . . .)
Class 4: Audience (including words involving the reader/audience): the

generic ‘we’ (i.e. ‘we’ that refers to both the author and the reader), one, . . .
Class 5: Reference to writer’s own work – macro-research outcome (includ-

ing words referring to the study or the paper): this study, this research, this
investigation, this paper, this article, this report, . . .
Class 6: Reference to writer’s own work – micro-research outcome (refer-

ring to details of the study, research instruments, and research-related
events/processes): the findings, the results, the purpose of the study, pedagogical
implications, test, questionnaire, survey, conclusion, discussion, argument,
explanation, interpretation, comparison, analysis, . . .
Class 7: anticipatory it and existential there
The grammatical subjects of all the independent clauses and finite reporting
clauses with that-complementizers were coded according to this scheme.
Previous studies of abstracts tended to employ a qualitative approach rather

than a quantitative approach to the analysis of linguistic features. For example,
Anderson and Maclean (1997: 14) claim that one of the ‘typical’ linguistic
features realizing the Methods move of the medical abstract is the ‘past passive
verb’, but they do not provide any statistics to show that this feature is dominant
in this move, and not in the other moves. A quantitative approach would provide
the necessary evidence for a researcher to reliably assign particular features
to particular communicative functions. The present study thus uses a com-
bination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify linguistic features
typical of each rhetorical move.
3. Findings
3.1 THE MACROSTRUCTURE OF ABSTRACTS
Move frequency
Most of the abstracts from TQ and MLJ had four to five moves, whereas most of
the abstracts from CE had three or four moves. A closer look at the occurrence
frequency of the moves in the corpus revealed that almost all the abstracts
from the three journals contained the Presenting the research (PTR) move, the
Summarizing the findings (STF) move and the Describing the methodology (DTM)
move (see Table 2). Such findings are in line with those of Santos’s (1996) with
the PTR move and the DTM move occurring in almost all the abstracts. The
TA B L E 2. Patterns of occurrence of moves in the abstracts from the three journals
Moves Number of Number of Number of CE

MLJ abstracts TQ abstracts abstracts containing
containing move containing move move
(N = 10) (N = 10) (N = 10)
Situating the research <STR> 4 5 3
Presenting the research <PTR> 10 10 10
Describing the
10 10 9
methodology <DTM>
Summarizing the
10 10 10
findings <STF>
Discussing the research <DTR> 7 9 5
only difference is that the STF move in the present corpus was present in all the
abstracts, whereas only 80 percent of the abstracts in Santos’s corpus (75 out
of 94 abstracts) contained this move. This discrepancy can be explained by the
fact that the corpus in the present study includes only empirical articles, thus
reporting the results is an important part of the study. The type of research
articles included in Santos’s corpus was not clearly identified, but it is likely that
he included both primary and secondary research articles. Secondary or theor-
etical research articles are less likely to have a Results or Findings section.
The fewer moves in CE reported earlier can thus be attributed to the low
frequency of occurrence of the Situating the research (STR) move and the
Discussing the research (DTR) move. The fewer occurrences of STRs and DTRs
in CE abstracts can be attributed to the more recent application of computing
technology in education compared to the field of applied linguistics, and thus
there is less need for situating the research or discussing the implication or
application of the results. All in all, Hyland’s (2004) suggestion that there is an
increasing trend of the appearance of STR and DTR moves in abstracts is not
apparent in this study, at least for the abstracts from CE.
Move sequence and move cycles

Generally speaking, the moves in the abstracts observed the sequence of moves
as presented in the model, that is, STR – PTR – DTM – STF – DTR. However,
there were a few exceptions in the abstracts from TQ and CE, with the STR move
coming after the PTR move in one abstract from TQ and the PTR move after the
DTM move in two abstracts from CE.
Move cycles were also found in several abstracts across the three journals.
For example, the following abstract from TQ had interesting move cycles with the
cycle DTM – STF – DTR occurring twice:
(1) <PTR> This article reports on a critical discourse analysis of Japanese English
as a foreign language (EFL) students’ written reflections on their experience of a
simulated racial inequality exercise at a university in Japan. <DTM> Initially, the
reflections were compared thematically with previously published narratives . . .
<STF> The results showed that students engaged well with the simulation . . .
<DTR> This result suggests that, according to traditional measures, the exercise
was as effective with Japanese students as it has been with white Americans in
promoting awareness of racial discrimination. <DTM> The written statements were
reanalyzed, however, from a critical pedagogical perspective . . . <STF> This analysis
revealed that the students’ written reflections contained a discourse of diversion
from racism. <DTR> The findings suggest that language teachers need to be more
critical . . . [TQ3]
However, the cases of move cycles found in the corpus seem to be studies which
have a structure Pilot study–Follow-up study.
Move embedding
Generally, most of the moves in the corpus were realized by a sentence or a series
of sentences or at least a clause (either finite or non-finite clause). However, there
were a few cases where a move appeared in the form of a phrase or a word due
to the compact nature of the abstract. For example:
(2) <PTR> This study investigates the ef fectiveness of {DTM} three methods of
learning vocabulary among 778 beginning second language (L2) learners
{/DTM}. [MLJ8]
Most of the move embeddings found in the corpus occurred with the Describing
the methodology (DTM) move, and this move was embedded in either the Pre-
senting the research (PTR) move or the Summarizing the findings (STF) move. The
fact that the DTM move is more likely to be embedded than the other moves can
be explained by the relative flexibility of the realization of this move. For instance,
the methods of the study can be expressed in a participial phrase at the begin-
ning of a sentence presenting the research. The methods can also be mentioned
in the form of a noun phrase functioning as a constituent element of the PTR
move or the DTR (Discussing the research) move.
3.2 LINGUISTIC REALIZATIONS OF ABSTRACT MOVES

The distribution of each linguistic feature across the five moves of the abstracts
from the three journals was calculated separately to identify quantitatively the
linguistic features that are prototypical of each move.2 For example, with regard
to the Voice feature, the frequencies of occurrence of active verbs and passive
verbs were compared across moves to establish whether active or passive verbs
predominate in each move. However, due to space constraints in this article,
those results are not presented here. Rather, typical linguistic features for each
move are grouped together and discussed under the relevant section below.
Within moves, the distribution of the features is fairly similar across the journals.
Thus, the discussion below is intended for the whole corpus unless stated
otherwise.
Linguistic realizations of Move 1 – Situating the research

The analysis of grammatical subjects revealed that 20 out of 23 STR moves of
the abstracts opened with a Class 3 – Other reference subject. For example:
(3) <STR> Swain (1985) pointed out the need for increased modified output in
the classroom in order to encourage learners to engage in more syntactic processing
. . . [MLJ4]
(4) <STR> Several studies have been conducted related to dropouts from on-campus and
distance education courses. However, no clear definition of dropout from academic
courses was provided. [CE1]
As shown in the above examples, the writers of the abstracts mention previous
researchers or studies in the field as a way of leading into their own study.
Although all the journals in the corpus had Class 3 subjects as the most
frequent subject categories in the Situating the research (STR) move of the abstract,
the distribution of verb tense, aspect and voice varied between the abstracts
from AL journals (MLJ and TQ journals) and those from the ET journal (CE). The
most frequent tense and aspect used in the abstracts from MLJ and TQ was the
present simple (67% and 80% respectively), whereas the most commonly used
tense and aspect in CE was the present perfect (63%). A closer look at the context
and use of these verb forms revealed that the use of a specific tense and aspect is
controlled by the grammatical subject with which it is associated. Different sub-
categories of subjects in this class favour different verb tenses and aspects. For
example, the present simple tends to occur with grammatical subjects that indicate
a general topic in the field (Class 3c), whereas the past tense tends to be used for verbs
with subjects indicating a specific researcher (Class 3a) or a specific research
object or outcome mentioned in previous research (Class 3d). For example,
(5) <STR> Listening comprehension (Class 3c) is a difficult skill for foreign language
learners to develop and for their teachers to assess. [TQ8]
(6) <STR> Swain (1985) (Class 3a) pointed out the need for increased modified output
in the classroom . . . [MLJ4]
(7) <STR> . . . However, no clear definition of dropout from academic courses (Class 3d) was
provided. [CE1]
On the other hand, grammatical subjects referring to previous research or

studies in general (Class 3b) tend to take the present perfect.
(8) <STR> Several studies (Class 3b) have been conducted related to dropouts from on-
campus and distance education courses . . . [CE1]
The observation of the correlation between tense and grammatical subject is

in line with Malcolm’s (1987), Swales’s (1990), and Salager-Meyer’s (1992)
findings.
Similarly, the choice of voice was controlled by the subject category. Whereas
more active verbs than passive verbs were found in the MLJ and TQ journals, more
passive than active verbs were found in the CE journal. Therefore, there was a
correlation not only between subject category and verb tense and aspect, but also
between these two features and the voice of the verb. The CE journal, being in
a younger field than the other journals, tends to opt for the use of grammatical
subjects referring to previous research in general and thus deploys more passive
present perfect verbs. On the other hand, the applied linguistics journals, being
longer in the field, tend to be able to make generalizations about the topic and
thus use more active present tense verbs.
There were also a few cases where the writer of the abstract makes use of
possibility modal verbs such as can or may when summarizing the findings of
previous research. Such uses of modal verbs reduce the definiteness of the claim
regarding previous research and thus take the responsibility off the writer him-
self or herself. For example:
(9) <STR> . . . However, higher level processes often depend on lower level processes,
such as letter and word identification, and deficient lower level processing can inhibit
reading comprehension (Koda, 1990). [TQ6]
Although authorial stance was not expressed explicitly in this move by the use of
first person pronouns I or we, it was shown through the use of attitudinal stance
adjectives and adverbs. These words were often used to emphasize the import-
ance of the topic, for example:
(10) <STR> Language learning motivation plays an important role in both research and
teaching, . . . [TQ9]
Such attitudinal words, as pointed out by Hyland (2004: 76), have the function
of ‘promotion’ in the STR move of the abstract.
Linguistic realizations of Move 2 – Presenting the research

The majority of Move 2s of the abstracts in the corpus were clearly signalled by
a grammatical subject that refers to the study itself. Nearly 65% of the gram-
matical subjects in the Presenting the research (PTR) move belonged to Class 5 –
Reference to writer’s own work – Macro research outcome. For example,
(11) <PTR> This article reports on a study investigating English language teaching (ELT)
practices in secondary-level classrooms in China. [TQ10]
(12) <PTR> This study focused on the effect of a cooperative strategy training program
on the patterns of interaction . . . [MLJ6]
There is, however, a difference between the two subjects in these examples.
While ‘this article’ refers to the physical object in front of the reader, ‘this study’
refers to the more abstract concept of the study. ‘This study’ in example (12) is
thus a more direct way of introducing the present study than ‘this article reports
on a study . . .’ in example (11). On the other hand, ‘this study’ seems to be a
more indirect way of saying ‘In this study, we . . .’ (as in example (13) below),
thus making the sentence sound less personal and more objective.
(13) <PTR> In this study, we extended the Technology Acceptance Model to include tech-
nical support as a precursor and then investigated the role of the extended model in
user acceptance of WebCT. [CE4]
In contrast to the Situating the research (STR) move, the present perfect was not
found at all in the Presenting the research (PTR) move. Only the present simple
and, to a lesser extent, the simple past were found in this move. Interestingly,
the patterns of subject and verb tense were very uniform in TQ: subjects such as
this article were accompanied by present tense verbs, while subjects such as this
study or this research were associated with past tense verbs. This difference can
be seen in the following typical examples from the corpus:
(14) <PTR> This article reports on a study investigating English language teaching prac-
tices in secondary-level classrooms in China. [TQ10]
(15) <PTR> This study investigated the effects of four types of listening support . . .
[TQ8]
‘This article’ or ‘This paper’ gives the sense of the immediate physical object
in front of the reader and thus takes a present tense verb, whereas ‘this study’
signals a report of what the research was about and thus takes a past tense verb.
However, ‘this study’ can also be used to refer to the present study as opposed
to any previous study or simply to refer to the purpose of the current study, in
which case it tends to take a present tense verb as can be found in the PTR move
of the other two journals MLJ and CE. For example,
(16) <PTR> This study focuses on how valid information about learner perception of strat-
egy use during communicative tasks can be gathered systematically . . . [MLJ5]
Since most sentences in this move begin with such subjects, it is not surprising
that the active voice is more common than passive voice in this move. Although
modal auxiliaries were also found in the PTR move, the type of modal verbs used
in this move was different from that in the STR move. They typically indicated
hypotheses or assumptions (e.g. might, could):
(17) <PTR> . . . it was hypothesized that the English reading comprehension difficulties
experienced by Arabic speakers might also reflect nontarget-like lower level proces-
sing of letters and words. [TQ6]
The presentation of hypotheses in combination with such modal verbs makes

the researcher appear far less confident about the outcome of the study. Most of
Move 2s, however, presented the study in a neutral way with a direct and plain
description of the study. As a result, hardly any evaluative words were found in
this move of the abstract.
Linguistic realization of Move 3 – Describing the methodology

A great proportion of subjects in the Describing the methodology (DTM) move
belonged to Class 1 – Objects of research and their attributes, with the participants
being the most frequent realization. For example,
(18) <DTM> . . . The sample (Class 1) consisted of 275 advanced learners studying English
for academic purposes prior to entering Australian universities . . . [MLJ1]
In contrast to the Situating the research (STR) move and the Presenting the research
(PTR) move, the predominant tense used in the DTM move across the journals
was the past tense. This is not surprising as the purpose of the DTM move is to
report the research methodology that has already been employed in the study.
A typical example of this move follows:
(19) <DTM> Intact classes were randomly assigned to the experimental or control condition,
and triads from within each group were videotaped at the beginning and end of the
experimental intervention . . . [MLJ6]
In addition to the use of objectivized subjects, the Describing the methodology

(DTM) move of the abstracts was also kept fairly impersonal with the presence
of more passive verbs in this move than in the other moves of the abstract. This
was more obvious in the CE journal than in the applied linguistics journals. One
possible explanation is that the DTM move of the CE abstracts more often starts
with a subject referring to a research object followed by what was done to the
object, whereas the applied linguistics abstracts tend to prefer reporting what
the subjects of the research did. It thus seems that the CE abstracts are more im-
personal than the abstracts in MLJ and TQ. Examples from the corpus regarding
the use of active verbs and passive verbs in the DTM move are given below:
(20) A sample of 252 secondary school graduates from different parts of the country
completed a questionnaire on various instructional practices. [TQ10]
(21) The study was carried out in a Turkish university with 216 undergraduate students
of computer technology as respondents. [CE2]
The impersonality of the DTM move was strengthened even further by the ab-
sence of modal verbs and evaluative words. First-person pronouns and their
derived forms were also hardly found in this move across the three journals.
Linguistic realizations of Move 4 – Summarizing the findings

Unlike the above moves, subject types in the Summarizing the findings (STF) move
varied across the journals. Class 6 – Reference to writer’s own work – Micro-research
outcome and Class 1 – Objects of research and their attributes tended to dominate
the subjects in the STF move of the MLJ abstracts, whereas Class 1 – Objects of
research and their attributes subjects prevailed in this move in the abstracts from
TQ and CE. The following extracts from the corpus illustrate the most common
types of subjects in the STF move:
(22) <STF> The results (Class 6) indicated that English proficiency (Class 1) accounted for
a range varying between 58% and 68% of EAP reading, whereas discipline-related
knowledge accounted for a range varying between 21% and 31%. The exact levels at
which the compensatory effect between the two variables takes place for successful
academic reading (Class 1) are provided . . . [MLJ7]
(23) <STF> The results (Class 6) showed that the most effective type of support overall
(Class 1) was providing information about the topic, followed by repetition of the
input. The learners’ level of listening proficiency (Class 1) had a significant interaction
effect, particularly in the case of question preview. Vocabulary instruction (Class 1)
was the least useful form of support, regardless of proficiency level. [TQ8]
As shown in the above examples, Class 6 subjects tend to occur at the beginning
of the STF move to signal the move. By comparison, the grammatical subjects of
subsequent sentences/clauses in the move are more likely to belong to Class 1.
The reason TQ and CE abstracts have more Class 1 grammatical subjects in the
STF move is that the STF move is longer in these two journals than in the MLJ
journal and hence contains more finite clauses. The change of grammatical
subjects in some STF moves of the present corpus is in line with what Lorés
(2004: 291) refers to as ‘simple linear TP [thematic progression] pattern’, where
the rheme of the first sentence becomes the theme of the second sentence.
The following example is taken from the present corpus:
(24) <STF> Results indicate that the learners used various strategies in order to achieve
understanding while interacting with one another. These strategies were used either
to obtain new information from interlocutors, to confirm information, or to repair
comprehension problems . . . [MLJ2]
The distribution pattern of verb tenses in the Summarizing the findings (STF)
move was similar to that of the Describing the methodology (DTM) move, that is,
there was preference for past tense over present tense. The use of past tense when
reporting the results of the study leaves the reader with the impression that the
writer is being objective and that he/she is plainly reporting the findings of the
research. On the other hand, the present tense gives the idea that the writer is
generalizing beyond the results of the study – the impression is that these are
widely accepted findings.
The presence of the author in this move was also sometimes indicated by the
use of epistemic stance words (e.g. possible, likely, certainly, need) and attitudinal
stance words (e.g. successful, useful, better). For example,
(25) <STF> British students were more likely to use computers for study purposes than
Chinese students . . . [CE5]
The results of stance nouns, adjectives and adverbs in the present study are, then,
in agreement with Stotesbury’s (2003a) claim that persuasion in research article
abstracts is sometimes expressed explicitly by means of evaluative words.
As in the Describing the methodology (DTM) move, the use of self-reference
words was hardly found in the Summarizing the findings (STF) move across the
journals. This finding is different from Hyland’s (2003) findings. In his study,
he found that the most common function of self-reference words in applied lin-
guistics abstracts is ‘stating results or claims’ (Hyland, 2003: 258). This difference
may be due to the type of research article abstracts in his corpus. It was not stated
clearly in Hyland’s study whether the abstracts in his corpus were taken from
empirical research articles or theoretical research articles. As mentioned before,
linguistic features in these two types of research articles can be very different
from each other. Theoretical research articles tend to be more argumentative
and thus the writer may need to be more assertive, whereas empirical research
articles tend to be more objective and impersonal.
A dominant syntactic structure in the STF move, which was almost non-
existent in the first three moves, was the use of that-complement clauses. Such
noun clauses occurred most frequently after reporting verbs. For example,
(26) <STF> The findings revealed that learners made significant improvements in both
content knowledge and functional linguistic abilities. [MLJ4]
This finding coincides with Hyland and Tse’s (2005b) observation that most of
the that constructions in the abstract referred to the writer’s own findings.
The pattern as shown in example (26) is typical of the STF moves across the
journals. The noun clause in the STF move is controlled by a past tense reporting
verb and contains a past tense verb itself.
Linguistic realizations of Move 5 – Discussing the research

The distribution patterns of subject categories in the Discussing the research (DTR)
move of the abstracts from the three journals were similar again with the dom-
inance of Class 6 – Reference to writer’s own work – Micro-research outcome and
Class 1 – Research objects and their attributes subjects. For example,
(27) <DTR> The results from this study (Class 6) suggest that the effects of CAI in
instruction (Class 1) are positive over TI. [CE3]
Similar to the Summarizing the findings (STF) move, most of the Discussing the
research (DTR) moves began with a Class 6 subject, followed by Class 1 subjects
in the projected noun clause.
In contrast with the Describing the methodology (DTM) and the Summarizing
the findings (STF) moves, the present tense was used almost exclusively in the
Discussing the research (DTR) move. As this move discusses the meaning of the
results and makes generalizations based on the findings in the previous move,
the use of present tense makes the sentence sound more general. The change from
past tense in the STF move to present tense in the DTR move also helps to signal
the change of move and thus makes the abstract clearer to the reader.
There was also a strong preference for the use of modal verbs and semi-
modal verbs as a hedging or boosting device in the DTR move, as illustrated in
the following extract:
(28) <DTR> The findings suggest that language teachers need to be more critical when
using racial inequality simulation exercises because a focus on the obvious engage-
ment and increased empathy commonly reported may miss the subtle forms of
oppression contained within language or society . . . [TQ3]
While the use of ‘may’ in the above example reduces the strength of the claim and
therefore, serves as a form of hedging, the semi-modal verb ‘need to’ strengthens
the author’s advice (more than, for example, ‘should’).
Like the STF move, the DTR move also made use of stance words to make the
author’s voice heard. For example,
(29) <DTR> . . . the criteria templates have emerged as useful evaluative tools for classroom
assessment . . . [CE8]
Another common strategy that writers used to make their presence explicit in
this move was the use of self-reference words I or we accompanied by the use of
the reporting verb suggest:
(30) <DTR> We suggest that using the keyword method with phonological keywords and
direct L1 keyword-translation links in the classroom leads to better L2 vocabulary
learning at early stages of acquisition. [MLJ8]
This finding is in line with Hyland’s (2003) observation that writers tend to
use self-mention at the beginning and end of the abstract for self-promotion.
The use of ‘we’ emphasizes the researchers’ own findings; at the same time, by
stating the agent explicitly, the writers take on the responsibility for the claim
that they make.
Although the reporting verb ‘suggest’ was sometimes found in other moves,
the most common place for this verb was in the DTR move. This can be attri-
buted to the tentativeness of researchers who are here interpreting their research
findings. For example,
(31) <DTR> The results from this study suggest that the effects of CAI in instruction are
positive over TI. [CE3]
(32) <DTR> We suggest that using the keyword method with phonological keywords and
direct L1 keyword translating links in the classroom leads to better L2 vocabulary
learning at early stages of acquisition. [MLJ8]
The expression of ‘we suggest . . .’ in example (32) sounds more tentative and
personal than the expression ‘the results from this study suggest . . .’ in example
(31). This also explains why such expressions as ‘we suggest . . .’ were only
found in the DTR move, while expressions such as ‘the results suggest . . .’ were
found in both the DTR move (as in example (31) above) and the STF move (as in
the following example):
(33) <STF> The results also suggest that learners at all proficiency levels were able to use
these strategies when needed and evidently without prior training in strategy use.
[MLJ2]
The use of the reporting verb ‘suggest’ in example (33), together with the
use of the past tense verb ‘were’ in the reported clause, signals the STF move.
On the other hand, the presence of the verb ‘suggest’, in combination with the
personal pronoun ‘we’ in example (32) above, signals the DTR move.
As in the STF move, noun clauses introduced by ‘that’ in the structure S1 + V1
+ that + S2 + V2 were also commonly found in the DTR move. For example,
(34) <DTR> The study suggests that integrative antiracism education can support
immigrant language learners’ intersectional and multilevel understandings of
discrimination . . . [TQ2]
Unlike the STF move, however, the DTR move had a different combination of
verb tenses. As mentioned above, both of the verbs in the main clause and the
noun clause in the STF move were typically in past tense. In contrast, the verbs
in both the main clause and the noun clause in the DTR move were more likely
to be in present tense.
Another point worth noting is that most of the post-predicate that-clauses
found in the abstracts (in both the STF move and the DTR move) retained the
that-complementizer, which is in accordance with Biber et al.’s (1999: 680)
finding that ‘retention of that is the norm in academic prose’. The only case with
the omission of that is in the following sentence from the corpus:
(35) <DTR> The findings suggest the important feature of a given L2 vocabulary exercise
is not depth of word processing but number of word retrievals required. [TQ4]
4. Conclusion
Taken together, the comparison of the macro-organization of abstracts from
the three journals of the two different yet related disciplines, applied linguistics
and educational technology, has shown that there are some differences in terms
of generic structure between the journals. On the other hand, the linguistic
realizations of moves are fairly similar across the journals and disciplines, which
suggests that across disciplines certain linguistic features are characteristic of
one move rather than another.
The analysis of the rhetorical structure of abstracts in the three journals
has revealed that the Presenting the research move, the Describing the methodology
move and the Summarizing the findings move are obligatory moves in abstracts
in all three journals. Whereas the Discussing the research move is fairly common
in the abstracts from the two journals in applied linguistics, the same cannot be
said for abstracts from CE in the field of educational technology. The Situating the
research move is the least frequent move in abstracts from all the journals. The high
frequency of occurrence of the Describing the methodology move in the present
corpus may be due to the choice of only empirical articles for the corpus.
Unlike the macro-organization, the distribution patterns of linguistic features
in the same move are quite similar across the journals. Instead, there is more
variation of the frequency of these features across moves. For example, for all
journals the most frequent form of the grammatical subjects in the Situating the
research move is Class 3 – Other reference, and the most frequent subject category
in the Describing the methodology move is Class 1 – Objects of research and their
attributes.
When it comes to the correlation between move types and linguistic features,
it can be said that the most outstanding linguistic feature that helps distinguish
moves in abstracts is the position and type of grammatical subject. However, it
must be noted that this is not as clear for the distinction of the Summarizing the
findings and the Discussing the research moves due to the overlapping occurrence
of Class 6 and Class 1 subjects (as discussed in section 3). The identification of
moves should thus be based on a cluster of features rather than on any single
linguistic feature.
In contrast to the general assumption that abstracts are objective and
impersonal, this study suggests that authorial stance does exist in abstracts,
although the extent of the author’s involvement varies from move to move. While
authorial voice is expressed through the use of stance words in the Situating
the research move and the Summarizing the findings move, the author’s stance is
more likely to be shown through the use of first-person pronouns in the Presenting
the research move, and also through the use of modal verbs as hedging devices
in the Discussing the research move. By contrast, the Describing the methodology
move is distinguished by the lack of first-person pronouns, modal verbs and
stance words, and is therefore more impersonal than all the other moves.
On the whole, this study has shown that the move identification based on
content or function only (i.e. based on the questions asked in Table 1) is supported
by the analysis of linguistic realizations. Such a method of move identification
helps avoid the circularity of move identification in most previous studies; it
also makes the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance more
objective.
The findings of the present study have pedagogical implications. Important
rhetorical and linguistic features of research article abstracts should be in-
corporated into academic writing courses for postgraduate students to prepare
them for participation in the world of publication. In such courses, students
need to be made aware of not only the rhetorical structure or generic organ-
ization of the research article abstract in their disciplines, but also the language
they need in order to express the rhetorical moves and their authorial stance.
Such knowledge is essential for graduate students in the course of their study
and in their subsequent academic career.
Ventola (1994) pointed out more than a decade ago that there was a lack
of instruction books that give novice writers useful advice on how to write an
abstract. A survey of the current handbooks reveals that this remains an issue.
For example, Lester and Lester’s (2005), Sorenson’s (2002), and Turabian’s
(2007) recently published handbooks on research paper writing do not mention
how to write an abstract at all. Although Lester and Lester (2006) have a sec-
tion on writing the abstract in the social sciences, they only give a very general
description of an abstract and provide a sample abstract. In order to provide
useful instructions on abstract writing to novice writers, these textbooks need
to show readers how to structure an abstract and how to realize the structure
linguistically. The novice writer needs to know not only what the prototypical
moves of an abstract in their discipline are but also how to organize them and
how to realize each move linguistically. For example, it is not sufficient to give
overly rigid advice such as ‘do not use personal pronouns’ or ‘use passive voice’.
Instead, textbook materials should be more specific as to how the writer can
use first-personal pronouns to promote their research or how they can use
passive voice to make their claim sound more objective. Such advice in textbooks
needs to come from corpus-based research findings and address the differences
between disciplines.
Finally, it should be remembered that the subject of the present study is
empirical research articles, and thus the results may only be applicable to this
specific genre. Other types of research article such as theoretical papers can
have different move structures and linguistic realizations of moves and authorial
stance. Although theoretical papers are less common than empirical papers
at least in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, further
studies of this genre or comparative studies of these two genres may yield
interesting results and give us a more complete picture of the research article
in these two disciplines.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the editor of the journal, Prof. Teun A. van Dijk, and the anonymous
reviewer for their comments on the previous version of this article. I would also like to
thank Dr Julie Bradshaw, Prof. Kate Burridge, and Dr Simon Musgrave for reading earlier
drafts of this article.
N OTE S
1. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that most researchers
in move analysis ‘use a cyclical rather than a circular approach, i.e. they first use
content clues, which are then corroborated or modified by a scrutiny of the lexical
and other signals’. However, as the purpose of the present study is to investigate the
linguistic realizations of moves, I separate the two processes, that is, focusing on
content first, and then on linguistic features that realize the moves.
2. The three sub-corpora of MLJ, TQ, and CE abstracts were similar in length (with 1595,
1834, and 1449 words respectively). However, the length of the sub-corpora did not
affect the results of the study as the linguistic features were compared proportionally
across moves and journals.
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A D D R E S S : PO Box 8193, Monash University LPO, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
[email: [email protected] or [email protected]]
English for Specific Purposes 45 (2017) 40–51
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
English for Specific Purposes

journal homepage: http://ees.elsevier.com/esp/default.asp
Is academic writing becoming more informal?

Ken Hyland*, Feng (Kevin) Jiang
Centre for Applied English Studies, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Informality has become something of a contemporary mantra as, from the denim-clad
Available online 7 October 2016 offices of internet startups to the pages of business reports, we are encouraged to shed
old constraints and relax conventions. This paper explores the perception that since
Keywords: informality has now invaded a large range of written and spoken domains of discourse,
Formality academic writing has also followed this trend. It asks the question whether academics are
Academic writing
now freer to construct less rigidly objective texts and craft a more inclusive relationship
EAP
with their readers. Taking a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in
Diachronic change
Rhetorical practices
four disciplines at three periods over the past years, we explore changes in the use of ten
key features regarded by applied linguists and style guide authors as representing infor-
mality. Our results show only a small increase in the use of these features, and that this is
mainly accounted for by increases in the hard sciences rather than the social sciences. It is
also largely restricted to increases in first person pronouns, unattended reference and
sentences beginning with conjunctions. We discuss these results and argue they represent
changes in rhetorical conventions which accommodate more obvious interpersonal in-
teractions in the sciences.
! 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
There is a general, though largely unexamined, assumption among those interested in such things that writing in many
domains has become less formal in recent years (e.g. Adel, 2008; Fairclough, 2001; Foster, 2005). Observers have noticed a
gradual shift away from standard detached and impersonal styles of writing to ones that allow more personal comment,
narration and stylistic variation, so that Mair, for example, notes “a trend towards the informal and the colloquial in written
communication” (1998: 153) and Leedham (2015) found greater informality in undergraduate essays. This trend towards
informality might be seen as part of a contemporary zeitgeist which blurs overt hierarchies and values interpersonal
engagement or, alternatively, be regarded as another form of insidious persuasion, what Fairclough (2001: 52) calls “synthetic
personalization”. It is possible, however, that the informality which has invaded a large range of written and spoken domains
once characterized by formality (journalism, business correspondence, administrative documents, etc.) has also spread to
academic writing. Indeed, it has been fashionable among applied linguists in recent years to search for evidence of greater
interactivity in academic prose and identify the ways that writers craft an inclusive relationship with their readers (e.g.
Hyland, 2004).
In this paper we explore this issue and investigate whether academic writing is becoming less formal and, if so, in what
ways and in what disciplines. We first attempt to characterize the notion of ‘informality’ and how it is understood by academic
discourse analysts and those who advise authors on academic style. Needless to say, while we know it when we see it, we find
‘informality’ to be a slippery concept, difficult to pin down with a clear definition. It is typically either defined in contrast with
* Corresponding author. CAES, Run Run Shaw Tower, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong.
E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Hyland).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.09.001
0889-4906/! 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
K. Hyland, F.(Kevin) Jiang / English for Specific Purposes 45 (2017) 40–51 41
formality, or in terms of lists of language features which are thought to comprise ‘informal elements’, such as using im-
peratives, employing “I” or starting sentences with “but”. Focussing on published research articles as the most important
genre of academic writing, we then undertake a comparative study of three corpora composed of papers in four fields drawn
from three distinct time periods, examining the frequencies of key ‘informal elements’.
1. What is informality?
The first place to start is with a definition or characterization of the term, but this is not altogether straightforward.
Informality is generally hetero-defined, the Latin prefix meaning “not, opposite of, without” (Online Etymology Dictionary,
2010) and demarcated as the absence of formality. It therefore presupposes the existence of formality and a recognized set
of practices built on a structure, authority or system. Thus the Cobuild dictionary defines formal speech as “very correct and
serious rather than relaxed and friendly” while in pragmatics, formality is associated with ‘negative politeness’ and the use of
distancing behaviour to respect the other’s face and their wish not to be imposed on (Brown & Levinson, 1978). More broadly,
Heylighen and Dewaele (1999: 1) state that: “A formal style is characterized by detachment, accuracy, rigidity and heaviness;
an informal style is more flexible, direct, implicit, and involved, but less informative”. In academic writing, then, formality
helps to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation by minimizing the context-dependence and fuzziness of expressions, while,
in contrast, informality rejects stuffy orthodoxy to project a relaxed and approachable persona.
Questions of formality thus relate to tenor, or the grammatical choices that enable speakers to enact their complex and
diverse interpersonal relations by selecting language options which project an appropriate persona and a suitable connection
with readers (Halliday, 1985). It is, therefore, associated with concepts like colloquial language (e.g. Hundt & Mair, 1999) or
language used in everyday conversation by ordinary people, and engagement, or how writers acknowledge and connect with
their readers (Hyland, 2005). We should not, however, jump to the conclusion that the gap between conversation and ac-
ademic writing is narrowing, despite the recognition that the latter is often strategically interactive (e.g. Hyland, 2004).
Academic genres, in fact, appear relatively resistant to penetration by colloquial features (Seone & Loureiro-Porto, 2005) so
that Hundt and Mair (1999: 221), for example, suggest that they reside at the more conservative end of “a cline of openness to
innovation ranging from “agile” to “uptight” genres”.
A key reason for this is that in research writing adherence to the conventions of formality suggests impartiality, precision,
distance and a faux egalitarianism, allowing authors to construct themselves and their readers as disinterested specialists.
The search for truth is couched in objectivity and the features of formality serve to minimize the quirks, foibles and interests
of individual authors to suggest an anonymous writer conducting democratic interactions with like-minded peers. This is a
context in which status, gender, experience and other social characteristics are subordinated to the accurate and detached
presentation of information. The conventions of formality mean that, as far as possible, authors leave their personalities at the
door when they sit down to write.
As a result, students are frequently cautioned against informality as it conveys impressions of the author that may be
unwelcome in academic writing. Style guide advices for undergraduates often point this out:
In sum, there’s a great disadvantage to writing informally in a history or classics class, since it makes you look both
casual and rushed, neither of which will help your grade. Conversely, there’s a great advantage to writing formally,
especially here, since formality forces you into a posture where you appear to create some distance between your own
feelings and the cause you’re arguing for. That’s good in this case, because it puts you in a more objective stance right
from the start. Objectivitydor even the mere appearance of being objectivedis good in academic writing.
(Guide to writing in history and classics, 2015)
Such advice is also given to research writers, although it is generally expressed more circumspectly:
Academic writers need to be sure that their communications are written in the appropriate style. The style of a
particular piece should not only be consistent, but also be suitable both in terms of the message being conveyed and the
audience. A formal research report written in informal, conversational English may be considered too simplistic, even if
the actual ideas and/or data are complex.
(Swales & Feak, 2012: 14)
Informality, then, is generally contrasted to what is seen to constitute formality. An influential early example of such a
contrast is Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) study of how scientists discuss their work in written and spoken modes. They observe,
for example, that interviews with academics are typically littered with controversies, speculative insights, intellectual
commitments and social biases. This is what the authors refer to as a “contingent repertoire” where actions are not disin-
terested responses to the natural world, but the “judgements of specific individuals acting on the basis of their personal
inclinations and particular social positions”. In contrast, of course, these features are absent in the same academics’ research
articles which are governed by a more objective “empiricist repertoire”:
Empiricist discourse is organized in a manner which denies its character as an interpretive product and which denies
that its author’s actions are relevant to its content.it portrays scientists’ actions and beliefs as following unpro-
blematically and inescapably from the empirical characteristics of an impersonal natural world.
(Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984: 56)
42 K. Hyland, F.(Kevin) Jiang / English for Specific Purposes 45 (2017) 40–51
Differences between the two, however, may be less cut and dried than this as research writing carries obvious traces of
speculation, personal biases and group affiliations (e.g. Hyland, 2004), but Gilbert & Mulkay’s distinction captures how for-
mality helps guide academics’ research writing.
While informality may be seen as a deviation from a traditional academic stance of objectivity, it is not just a colloquial
style or the opposite of detachment. Informality in academic writing is the expression of a more personal tenor which implies
a closer relationship to readers, a willingness to negotiate claims and a positive attitude towards subjectivity. It is relevant to
this study as it implies a set of features and rhetorical characteristics which can be identified and counted, allowing us to
measure changes in academic argument. Considering informality as a set of distinctive features used to achieve certain
rhetorical goals also allows us to see the formal/informal distinction as a continuum, rather than as a language binary. Coffin
et al. (2003) make this explicit in their definition:
By formality we mean the use of technical, elevated or abstract vocabulary, complex sentence structures and the
avoidance of the personal voice. If we think of formality as a cline from the most formal (e.g. legal documents) to the
most informal (e.g. electronic mail between friends), most academic writing falls nearer to the legal documents than
the friendly email. (Coffin et al., 2003).
The notion of a continuum is also implicit in Heylighen and Dewaele’s (1999) understanding of formality as the
avoidance of ambiguity. Informality for them is information which refers to the background knowledge and assumptions
which makes communication possible, but complete informal fuzziness “merely signifies that any interpretation is as likely
as any other one” (Heylighen & Dewaele, 1999: 9). Any text must carry such assumptions, but have at least a minimal
formality to be intelligible. In academic writing, then, the basic advantage of formality is that there is less chance of being
misinterpreted or persuasion being influenced by the social characteristics of writers. Any increase in informality is
therefore likely to reflect changing norms of engagement which accommodate greater flexibility of tenor rather than the
abandonment of conventions.
Informality, then, is not simply a reluctance to attend to conventional practice, any more than it is an inappropriately
colloquial use of language. Instead it is an attempt to establish a particular kind of relationship with readers, one which makes
assumptions about a shared context and seeks to create a collegial familiarity. Such patterns of engagement, of course, display
disciplinary membership and so need to ensure that appropriate standards of precision are observed, meaning that academic
writers are unlikely to stray too far along the cline towards informality.
2. Features of informality
Informality in academic writing can be identified by a set of features which have a high chance of co-occurrence, although
there is some disagreement about quite what the decisive features are.
One approach to identifying related features is Biber’s (1988) multidimensional corpus analyses of spoken and written
texts. Using a correlational statistical technique known as factor analysis, he shows how 16 major grammatical categories
typically co-occur in five dimensions of variation, with Dimension 1, labelled “involved versus informational production”,
being closest to what we understand as informality/formality. Involved genres contain more verb and pronoun forms, adverbs
and interjections and have fewer nouns, prepositions and attributive adjectives. Biber (1995: 143) observes that involved
features “reflect direct interaction, focus on the immediate circumstance and personal attitudes or feelings, fragmentation or
reduction in form, and a less specific, generalized context”. While Biber describes these differences as oral vs. literate
discourse, they characterize the kind of engagement which is typical among intimates or in encounters where there is no
necessity to elaborate a shared context. In this way they help clarify the concept of formality and its expression.
A second approach to formality has been proposed by Heylighen and Dewaele (1999) who see it in the assembly of features
which contribute to the precision and context independence of a text. So by listing all words with a deictic function, referring
to the communicative context, in one category and features which largely assume knowledge of such a context in the other,
they propose a formula to measure formality. Higher frequencies of nouns, adjectives, prepositions and articles are said to
reduce the level of background information needed to understand a text and so make a text more formal while more verbs,
pronouns and interjections refer more to the immediate context and make it less formal. Thus, as more context is provided,
the level of formality increases. Outside of a purely mathematical proof, however, a completely formal text which fails to build
a context and a relationship with readers is impossible, but an increase in formal features reduces the background knowledge
needed to understand a text.
Formality is thus a result of the need for more context and all texts are situated between the two extremes of complete
fuzziness and complete exactitude with the precise degree of formality influenced by the writer’s assessment of the context.
So, Heylighen and Dewale’s characterization is similar to Biber’s in identifying formal texts as more nominal and informal
texts as more verbal, with more-or-less rather than all-or-nothing distributions. This is, however, is a very broad approach
which equates formality with context independence and makes assumptions about the function of grammatical classes in
achieving this. But while it is true that pronouns serve to deixically anchor a statement to a given context, and so may be
interpreted as belonging to the ‘informal’ category, we should be cautious in supposing that nouns are always more formal
than verbs. Indeed, by highlighting a writer’s stance towards a message, noun complement structures can introduce a more
informal and engaging element into texts (Jiang & Hyland, 2015), as here (all examples from our corpus):
(1) Collectivism makes the mistake of making the individual fully heteronomous by locating the sovereign source
of normativity entirely outside the individual in the community. [Philosophy article]
(2) The procedure offers the advantage of obtaining more precise structural estimates. [Marketing article]
Such expressions are among the resources used by academic writers to front load their attitude to the accompanying
clause and so can tie utterances very closely to the interactional context.
A third way of identifying features of informality is to turn to the style guides, which reflect something of the concerns and
thinking of teachers, students and practitioners. Bennet’s (2009) survey of style manuals, for example, found frequent references
to ‘objectivity’ and an insistence “that academic writing is by nature formal and technical”, achieved by the extensive use of
Latinate vocabulary and impersonal structures. Chang and Swales (1999) researched 40 style manuals published to compile a list
of the most frequently mentioned grammatical features recommended to attain an appropriate degree of formality. First person
pronouns, WH questions, listing expressions (such as etc., and so on) and contractions appear in their list of ‘informal elements’
although style manuals authors take different positions with regard to how suitable these might be in research writing. Our own
brief survey of the first 25 relevant sites thrown up by a simple Google search, including many university language advice sites,
reveals similar admonishments to avoid many of these features, although this is perhaps less ‘absolutist’ than in earlier times.
The uncertainties surrounding informal features remind us that such elements are not monolithic conventions observed in
all academic genres, and style guide authors have problems capturing the complexity of the rhetorical choices involved in
selecting and employing them. There is also the fact that formality at the sentence level is likely to be subjectively interpreted
by readers, influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions and subject to fashion and changing usage. Nor are these
features static and unchanging markers of professional research writing. Using Biber’s multidimensional categories, for
example, Atkinson (1999) tracked changes in papers published by the Royal Society of London in its journal The Philosophical
Transactions between 1675 to 1975 finding a relentless growth in ‘informational’ features until the latter date, a change which
Atkinson describes as a move from a less ‘author-centred’ rhetoric to a highly abstract and ‘object-centred one’.
In sum, we have sought to prepare the ground for a study of informality in academic writing. We have tried to define a
somewhat slippery term, first in terms of the concept the prefix opposes, formality, and then as linguistic features which
establish a close relationship with readers by realizing a relatively personal tenor which allows writers to make assumptions
about a shared context. We have also sought to show that this tenor can be identified and measured by the presence of certain
features often regarded negatively by style guide authors. We now turn to our corpus and analytical methods to address our
guiding question: Has academic writing become less formal and, if so, in what ways and in what disciplines?
3. Corpus and method
To discover to what extent and in what ways professional academic writing may have grown more informal in recent
times, we constructed three corpora to present a snapshot of four disciplines at three periods over the past 50 years: 1965,
1985 and 2015, a period of 20 years between the first dates and then to the present day. The different time spans were chosen
to see if any changes were more pronounced in the later or earlier period, although we were concerned with overall changes
over the 50 years. We chose applied linguistics, sociology, electrical engineering and biology as representative of both the soft
applied fields and the hard sciences, selecting six papers at random from each of the same five journals which had achieved
the top ranking in their field according to the year impact factor in 2015.1 The journals are listed in Appendix 1 and together
the corpus comprised 360 papers of 2.2 million words as shown in Table 1:
Table 1
Corpus size and composition.
Discipline 1965 1985 2015 Overall

Applied linguistics 110,832 144,859 237,452 493,143
Biology 244,706 263,465 237,998 746,169
Engineering 92,062 97,545, 235,681 425,288
Sociology 149,788 196,232 262,203 608,223
Totals 597,388 604,556 973,334 2,272,823
The corpora were grammatically annotated (part of speech tagged) using Tree Tagger then combed for ‘informal elements’
using the AntConc concordance software (Anthony, 2011). Some of the features listed in Table 2, such as first person pronouns
and unattended anaphoric pronouns, were retrieved easily through concordancing individual items (e.g. I/we and this/these/
that/those/it). Others, like split infinitives, were searched using a regular expression query based on their syntactic structure.2
After extracting the items, each one was then checked manually by each author independently to confirm it was a target
feature, producing an inter-rater agreement of 93% before resolving disagreements.
1
Two journals, TESOL Quarterly and Foreign Language Annals only began in 1967 and so papers were chosen from issues in that year.
2
to_TOns(nw*_RBns)þnw*_Vnw* was used to search for split infinitives in the POS tagged corpus.
Table 2
List of informal features.
1. First person pronouns to refer to the author(s) (I and we)

e.g., “I will approach this issue in a roundabout way.”
2. unattended anaphoric pronouns (this, these, that, those, it) that can refer to antecedents of varying length
e.g., “This is his raw material.”
3. split infinitives – an infinitive that has an adverb between to and the verb stem
e.g., “The president proceeded to sharply admonish the reporters.”
4. Sentence initial conjunctions or conjunctive adverbs
e.g., “And I will blame her if she fails in these ways.”
5. Sentence final preposition
e.g., “A student should not be taught more than he can think about.”
6. listing expressions (‘and so on’, ‘etc’, ‘and so forth’ used when ending a list)
e.g., “These semiconductors can be used in robots, CD players, etc.”
7. Second person pronouns/determiners to refer to the reader (you and your)
e.g., “Suppose you are sitting at a computer terminal which assigns you role R”
8. contractions
e.g., “Export figures won’t improve until the economy is stronger.”
9. direct questions
e.g., “What can be done to lower costs?”
10. exclamations
e.g., “This is not the case!”
We decided to employ the list of informal features identified by Chang and Swales (1999 3) as the items here corresponded most
closely with our own survey and our experience as language teachers. We made one change as the category of sentence fragments
almost never occurs in research writing, where cases are presumably removed by authorial self-editing or the language pro-
fessionals who are sometimes employed by writers to edit their texts. We substituted this with second person pronouns, which do
occur although are generally regarded as taboo by style authors. The widely used Writing Commons4 website, for example, advises:
Writing from the second person point of view can weaken the effectiveness of the writing in research and argument
papers. Using second person can make the work sound as if the writer is giving directions or offering advice to his or
her readers, rather than informing or persuading them.
The final list, presented with Chang and Swales’ examples, is given in Table 2. These features not only express the concerns
of style guide writers and teachers, but also correspond to what is generally considered to be ‘informal’ language (e.g. see
Biber, 1988; Chafe, 1986; Nash, 1986), conveying interactiveness, involvement and personal engagement with readers. The list
also carries the apprehensions of novice research writers who are often understandably nervous about making use of such
stylistic opportunities (see Chang & Swales, 1999). We also suspected that these features, or at least some of them, might
reflect the tension between linguistic prescriptivism and current authorial practice, as we discuss in the next section.
4. Trends in academic style: the demise of formality?
Our results show a fairly complex picture when we seek to measure these ‘informal elements’. Table 1 above shows a
substantial growth in the length of published articles over the period, amounting to a 63% increase in the number of words,
and we see an almost exactly corresponding growth in the use of informal elements, with a similar increase in raw fre-
quencies. Table 3 presents the changes in informality features in the corpus over this period as occurrences per 10,000 words.
Table 3
Distribution of features of informality over time (per 10,000 words).
Discipline 1965 1985 2015 % change

Applied linguistics 213.8 202.7 191.7 "10.3%
Sociology 205.0 200.5 198.8 "3%
Electrical engineering 142.4 150.0 155.2 þ9%
Biology 112.3 121.4 140.2 þ24.8%
Averages 168.4 168.7 171.5 þ2%
In broad strokes, there has been a small increase of around 2% in the use of informality features in published academic
writing over the past 50 years, when the increase in overall words published is taken into account. This is, however, largely a
result of increases in hard science writing rather than in the social sciences, which have become slightly more formal. As the
table shows, writers in applied linguistics have steadily reduced their use of informal elements since 1965 by about 10.3% and
sociology by about 3%. Electrical engineering gradually increased the number of informal features in its main journals over the
period, up by 9%, and biology, once again the odd-one-out, rising by a substantial 24.8%.
3
See also Swales and Feak (2012) Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
4
Writing Commons, http://writingcommons.org is a peer-reviewed resource for academic writers.
Table 4
Changes in use of informality features by discipline (per 10,000 words).
Feature Applied Ling Sociology Electrical Biology
1965 1985 2015 1965 1985 2015 1965 1985 2015 1965 1985 2015
First person 60.9 53.6 52.5 46.5 42.8 68.6 46.9 53.9 68.8 10.9 23.6 34.1
Unattended reference 108.9 70.8 71.8 104.9 75.0 66.2 61.9 60.6 58.9 80.7 62.5 44.1
Initial conjunctions 30.6 32.0 37.9 38.3 37.7 49.0 30.1 31.2 38.6 19.3 29.6 40.1
Second person 4.9 6.4 10.0 9.3 7.2 4.4 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.3
Listing expressions 3.5 2.8 1.9 1.6 1.4 1.0 2.3 1.3 1.0 0.4 0.4 0.1
Contractions 1.8 4.8 13.5 2.3 3.3 5.1 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.1 1.2
Preposition ending 1.3 0.3 1.0 1.2 0.5 0.9 0.2 0.3 0.5 0.0 0.0 0.3
Exclamation 1.3 1.2 0.8 0.4 0.1 1.1 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.3 0.1 0.0
Split infinitives 0.6 0.7 2.1 0.5 0.8 2.5 0.8 2.3 2.4 0.1 1.3 2.3
Direct questions 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.1 0.5 0.1 0.1
Table 4 shows that the overall figures are largely influenced by the frequencies of three main features: first person pro-
nouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs, with second person
pronouns/determiners and listing expressions much further behind. The table also shows that informal features are not
changing in a single direction nor behaving in uniform ways, either across times or disciplines. Contractions and spit in-
finitives now seem to be more tolerated by copy editors than in the past and have increased across all fields, as have direct
questions, while listing markers show a marked decline overall. Sentences ending with a preposition fell slightly and rose
again to a lower level than originally in the soft knowledge fields and barely showed any movement in the sciences. Second
person increased greatly in applied linguistics, but fell in sociology while first person fell in applied linguistics and rose in the
other disciplines. In the next section we discuss these trends in more detail.
5. How is formality changing?
As mentioned, first and second person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions/
conjunctive adverbs comprise the majority of features, accounting for 97.3% of all informal elements in 1965 and 94.3% in
2015. In this section we discuss each of these features in turn.
First person pronouns, often considered the defining marker of informality, account for much of the increase in informal
features with 45% overall growth during the period. This phenomenon has also been noted by Seone (2013) who has traced a
decline in the frequency of be-passives with respect to transitive actives between 1905 and 1990 in hard science articles both
in British and in American texts. A reduction in the use of the passive in her data suggests an increase in the need for first
person pronouns. This drop from around 65%–53% of cases is more pronounced towards the second half of the century and
seems, moreover, to be a more general trend in all types of writing (Leech, Hundt, Mair, & Smith, 2009; Mair & Leech, 2006). In
academic genres the increase in first person may be related to the greater participation in published research by authors
whose first language is not English and in which first person does not carry the same connotations of personal projection and
authority (see Nelson & Castello, 2012). Interestingly, in our data, applied linguistics is the only discipline of the four which
has seen a decline in the use of first person, perhaps as a result of the self-consciousness of language-sensitive writers aware
of the attention this draws to the individual and the strong claims it makes for agency in research.
Overall, however, the convention of avoiding the first person to convey an impersonal stance, once a hallowed principle for
style guide writers and science authors, now seems to be less rigidly adhered to, most dramatically in biology with a massive
213% rise (from 10.9 per 10,000 words in 1965 to 34.1 in 2015). It may seem surprising that it should be a scientific discipline
which has been most enthusiastic in undermining what is a cornerstone of positivist objectivity. Empiricism has traditionally
stressed the persuasive authority of impersonality to maximize the credibility of the writer and elicit credence from the
reader. Lachowicz (1981: 111) for example, argued that impersonality emphasizes “objectivity, open-mindedness, and the
established factual nature of a given activity”, it functions to underline the “common share of knowledge with the com-
munity”, and stresses the collective responsibility of academic endeavour. Eradication of the self is seen as demonstrating a
grasp of scholarly persuasion as it allows the research to speak directly to the reader in an unmediated way.
Academic publishing demands that authors display some degree of disciplinarity; that they demonstrate a familiarity with
the rhetorical conventions and social understandings of the community, and observe suitable patterns of social and rhetorical
interactions (e.g. Hyland, 2004). Arguments have to be made in ways that readers find most acceptable and convincing, and
research claims framed to project appropriate certainty and maximum plausibility. However, in addition to constructing
themselves as plausible members of the discipline, research writers must balance this with vigorous argument for the
originality of their claims and the display of an authoritative professional persona. Ivani! c (1998) and Hyland (2001) have
stressed the importance of I in constructing an independent voice and authorial identity in academic writing. Hyland (2012),
in fact, refers to choices relating to proximity or positioning. This involves constructing a text which not only persuades, but
also engages readers and first person pronouns are a powerful means for establishing authority and personal projection. It
appears, as we will discuss further below, that in the changing and highly competitive context in which research is now
conducted and presented, these considerations are becoming ever more important to writers.
Unattended reference is associated with informality due to its predominance in spoken varieties of discourse and the fact
many style guides recommend careful writers to generally avoid it as “Out of control, the unattended this points everywhere
and nowhere” (Geisler, Kaufer, & Steinberg, 1985: 153). Swales and Feak (2012) argue that following this with an appropriate
NP reduces possible comprehension difficulties by readers and helps make the writer appear more professional and
authoritative. Strauss (1993) estimates that 40% of uses in speech are unattended and Swales (2005) gives a similar figure of
46% for MICASE dissertation defences, both of which are much higher than in research texts (around 30% of cases). They occur
quite frequently in academic prose, however, around 60 times per 10,000 words on average, due to their use in marking
immediate text reference (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999: 349). But we can see from Table 4 that this
element has declined dramatically across all disciplines during this period, by 34% (from 108.9 to 71.8 per 10,000 words) in
applied linguistics, 37% (from 104.9 to 66.2) in sociology and 45% (from 80.7 to 44.1) in biology.
These anaphoric, or backward-pointing pronouns (this, these, that, those, and it) refer to antecedents of varying length,
from individual words to entire sections of texts. Gray (2010) argues that they follow the given/new principle of thematic
progression and so function to alert readers to the fact that new information is about to be presented. Wulff, Romer, and
Swales (2012) suggest the decision to use unattended this is related to the accompanying verb, with simple forms such as
this is and this means most common. But what governs the writer’s decision to include an “attended” (Geisler et al., 1985) or
“supporting” noun phrase remains uncertain. This is the difference between spelling out the referent (3) or not (4):
(3) This connection between interfaces and optionality in L1 and L2 bilinguals suggests that whenever there is
more than one language at stake, there are tangible consequences to the representation of the grammar of
speakers.
[App ling, 2015]
(4) At the operation bandwidth where S11 is small, transmission coefficient and coupling are very close, while out
of this band the coupling level is higher than S21. This demonstrates that for antennas with poor matching S21
is not a good measure of the potential coupling between antennas. [Elec eng, 1965]
For some observers, a singular demonstrative pronoun has a restricted referential capacity and is a poor choice to refer to
entire contexts or implied referents (e.g. Hinkel, 2004). In such cases a demonstrative determiner followed by an appropriate
noun is needed. Finn (1995), on the other hand, argues that the redundancy of an unnecessary NP slows down the flow of new
information to the reader. There is obviously a trade-off here between snappy economy and ponderous clarity, with the noun
phrase reducing the chance of ambiguity. In this example, for instance, it is unclear whether this refers to the entire preceding
proposition or only to the information in the second clause:
(5) As a result, the announcement that the game will end at some specific point in the future immediately transforms
universal defection into the sole subgame–perfect equilibrium (simply by changing expectations). This is true
regardless of how far off in the future the end of the game is. [Soc, 1985]
Swales (2005) found that around half of the uses of the singular proximal demonstrative in the Hyland corpus5 occur in
finite clause subjects, thus confirming the widespread cohesive use of this device. Thus Swales and Feak (2012: 21) talk of its
role in facilitating ‘flow’ or “moving from one statement in the text to the next”. It does, however, also suggest a more informal
or engaging rhetorical stance, assuming that the reader is following the writer’s argument and is looking at things from the
same perspective, thus producing an “impression of closeness and solidarity between reader and writer” (Mauranen, 1992:
243). However, by omitting a nominal after a demonstrative, authors may be missing a rhetorical trick. While Swales (2005)
shows that the majority of attended NPs are metadiscoursal, referring either to the article itself (study/article/paper/research)
or the method (method, technique, procedure), many are more interpretive, offering a gloss on the referenced text. As in these
examples, a summarizing noun can send a strong attitudinal signal to the reader:
(6) This defect in the cortical actin cytoskeleton gives rise to . [Bio, 2015]
(7) This unpredictability of drinking violence. [Soc, 2015]
(8) Those striking contradictions opened up the possibility of conflict. [Soc, 1985]
(9) These dominant discourses can be seen in the . [App ling, 2015]
(10) This strong conclusion points to a novel response. [Elec eng, 2015]
More important than appearing ‘informal’ to readers is the need to persuade them of the veracity of a given view and, as
Geisler et al. (1985: 151) observe, “writers should make sure that opportunities for useful emphasis or additional charac-
terization have not been lost by leaving a this unattended”.
Sentence initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs also reflect the spoken language characteristics of fragmentation
and real time unplanned production (e.g. Chafe, 1986). But while style guides generally recommended authors to avoid them,
some examples have, like first person pronouns, been “legitimized” in English academic writing. This is shown in Table 5.
5
A corpus of 240 research articles from 8 disciplines.
Table 5
Initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs by discipline per 10,000 words (2015).
Applied Ling Sociology Biology Elec Eng

illicit initial 37.9 49.0 40.1 34.7
initial and 1.2 1.9 0.6 0.0
initial but 1.4 2.8 1.3 1.4
initial so 1.2 1.3 0.0 1.1
initial or 0.2 0.5 0.0 0.0
initial however 8.5 8.0 9.4 4.8
initial also 1.1 0.3 0.4 1.0

initial thus 3.4 4.7 3.9 4.3
initial yet 0.4 2.7 1.2 0.0
initial indeed 1.1 1.2 2.4 0.9
initial again 0.8 0.2 0.1 0.3
Overall these features show an average of 40.4 items per 10,000 words. But, thus and however, are particularly common in
the corpus with sociologists being the most enthusiastic users and electrical engineers the least. Using a regular expression
query we were able to identify a much larger variety of initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs than Chang and Swales
(1999) original study of informal elements, finding items such as also, thus, yet and again appearing frequently. Moreover, the
list above is not exhaustive and our search revealed a number of other, less common, ’forbidden’ initials such still and next. The
following examples illustrate something of the informal stylistic effect of these features
(11) But the paper then contextualizes the early studies from the standpoint of my current work with Colleagues on
ageing and discourse. [App ling, 2015]
(12) So the assert-the-stronger maxim fails. [Soc, 2015]
(13) Again, whether the shift in mycorrhizal fungal communities is a cause or a symptom of the loss of plant species
diversity in grasslands is unresolved.
[Bio, 2015]
Diachronically, we found considerable increases in the frequency of these ‘informal’ initial conjunctions/conjunctive
adverbs with a rise of 50% since 1985, due largely to increases in the use of initial however, so and indeed (see Table 6). Applied
linguistics, sociology and electrical engineering had increases of between 24 and 28% although biology, once again the outlier,
recorded a smaller increase of 15.5% (although it has a higher frequency of 9.4 per 10,000 words than the other three dis-
ciplines in 2015). This may, speculatively, illustrate something of the distinctive ways that biology pursues and argues
problems (Chargaff, 1974; Hyland, 2004) and the developed sense of rhetorical awareness among many of its writers
(Halloran, 1984), perhaps extending to issues of ‘correctness’ in stylistic choices.
The large increases in initial however and declines in and and but were overwhelmingly accounted for by changes in
applied linguistics and sociology. Sociology also showed a large increase in yet and biology in the use of indeed, although none
of these features are highly frequent. Overall, it seems that initial however has become a legitimate, indeed commonplace,
marker of contrast/adversity across all disciplines and that the need for clear and unambiguous assertion has been filled by
the marker indeed, especially in applied linguistics and biology.
Second person pronouns is the final feature we want to mention here, and once again, its widespread use in everyday
conversation invests it with an informality that academic writers are advised against. Second person you and your are perhaps
the most obvious way of referring to readers and it is 25 times more common in conversation than in academic writing (Biber
et al., 1999: 334). This is because it carries certain interactional risks, for by explicitly acknowledging the reader’s presence
writers are seeking to engage them more closely and create a sense of intimacy, attempting to get them on board and carry
Table 6
Sentence initial conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs 1965–2015 (per 10,000 words).
1965 per 10,000 1985 per 10,000 2015 per 10,000

illicit initial 1661 27.8 2017 28.7 4049 42.9
initial and 87 1.5 91 1.3 95 1.0
initial but 221 3.7 187 2.7 177 1.9
initial so 19 0.3 25 0.4 89 0.9
initial or 7 0.1 13 0.2 18 0.2
initial however 239 4.0 285 4.1 760 8.1
initial also 41 0.7 57 0.8 70 0.7

initial thus 242 4.1 281 4.0 409 4.3
initial yet 46 0.8 74 1.1 108 1.1
initial indeed 23 0.4 54 0.8 137 1.5
initial again 21 0.4 29 0.4 35 0.4
them along with an argument. This is not, however, always welcome by interlocutors quickly scanning for bottom line results
relevant to their own research.
The second person pronoun is used by authors to refer to readers either as individual or general referents (Biber et al.,
1999: 328–331). So, in some cases we see readers spoken to personally as participants in the text:
(14) If we are to disagree, what I say or assert must be what you deny. But this does not commit one to the existence of
entities beyond space and time, only to the conceptual truism that if I deny what you assert, and you assert that p,
then I deny that p. [Soc, 1965]
(15) You were recently in the market for a new car and, after narrowing your search, chose the Saab 900S over the
Volvo 850 and the Pontiae Bonneville. The Saab performs in accordance with your expectations. On the way to
dinner one evening, your wife mentions that a car buff co-worker told her that the Volvo 850 is the best designed
car he has seen. How do you feel about your Saab now?
[Soc, 1965]
In other cases, writers use you with a wider semantic reference, referring to people in general, like the indefinite pronoun
one, rather than with specific discourse participants:
(16) You can see this most clearly with respect to the question of ecology.
[Bio, 2015]
(17) The premise upon which Steinberg’s reasoning is based is clear. You know you have a good definition of a
picture if you can use it to explain what a picture is to a congenitally or early blind person. [Soc, 2015]
Here, you carries a more encompassing meaning than rhetorically focussing on an individual reader, seeking instead to
engage with an audience by recruiting its members into a world of shared experiences.
The authors analysed all occurrences of second person to determine the referent (agreement of 92%) and, as Table 7 shows,
it is general reference which dominates the frequencies and which has seen the largest increase in the past 50 years, growing
by 24% despite there being only 3 instances per 10,000 words in 2015. Interestingly, more specific reference, which is more
conversational and so might be seen as carrying more personal and informal meanings, has seen no overall increase.
Second person remains unknown in electrical engineering and biology texts and has fallen by half in sociology, while
doubling in applied linguistics to just one per 10,000 words. Clearly, norms of interpersonal engagement seem to be changing
only slowly in the use of this feature, underlining something of a reluctance by writers to involve their readers more directly
in their arguments.
6. Discussion and conclusions
Overall, our findings suggest that the answer to the question posed in our title is ‘it depends’. While academic writing is
becoming more informal, this is by small margins and depends on the discipline and features being considered. We have
studied only a sample of four disciplines and there is certainly room for further work exploring trends in other fields,
especially in the area of how informality manifests itself through lexis, which we have not had space to explore. Even in our
corpus, the process of change is not occurring in all disciplines or in all features. Broadly, our selected ‘informal elements’
show a small rise of 2% since 1965 when normed for the increase in published words, although this is mainly due to increases
in first person pronouns, unattended reference and sentences beginning with conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs.
Moreover, it is the science and engineering disciplines in our sample which have become less formal while trends for the
social science fields indicate a reduction in the use of these informal features.
It is also worth pointing out that despite this small increase in informality, the proportion of nouns and adjectives in
relation to verbs and pronouns, suggested by Heylighen and Dewaele’s (1999) as markers of relative formality, is actually
increasing. Some readers may want to see this as representing an underlying constant of formality in academic writing, while
others might regard it as indicating a necessary precision and informativity in scholarly writing. We would simply caution
against strong claims in this regard and emphasize that any trend towards informality is not cut and dried.
Biber and Gray (2016), moreover, observe an inclination during the 20th century towards more compressed, phrasal
expressions over-elaborated, clausal expressions in academic writing which, while allowing for faster, more efficient pro-
cessing by expert readers are more opaque to novices. Although our research suggests that we are witnessing a very gradual
move towards greater use of some salient informal features in academic writing, it is important not to overestimate either the
extent or speed of the change. Genres are supported by powerful interests, not least by academics who have invested years
Table 7
Changes in Second person pronoun use by referent (per 10,000 words).
2nd person reference 1965 1985 2015

General reference 2.5 2.3 3.1
Specific reference 0.8 0.7 0.9
into acquiring their arcane conventions, and so change only slowly. They also change for reasons which more directly relate to
the rhetorical purposes of the genre and gradual adjustments to norms of interpersonal persuasion rather than efforts to
weaken existing structures in favour of more ‘friendly’, relaxed’ or conversational practices.
The slow increase in the use of informal features in academic writing is, we believe, related to changing rhetorical practices
which support greater efforts to involve readers in arguments and secure support for their claims through positioning them-
selves more explicitly in relation to their ideas and readers. It is, then, part of a wider shift seen in many domains toward more
engaged and intimate forms of interaction. Fairclough (2001) has discussed this in relation to the ‘synthetic personalization’ of
texts from the worlds of commerce and media to give the impression of treating mass audiences as individuals. However, this
seems to be less to do with overt manipulation than an attempt to embrace a more direct and egalitarian relationship to achieve
recognizable persuasive goals. We see here changing textual practices for producing agreement in published academic writing.
The expression of opinions and assessments is nothing new in academic discourse, but a ubiquitous feature of all human
interaction. Despite its apparently impersonal facade, the evaluation and interpretation of methods, sources, claims and data
underpin the construction of knowledge and the projection of competent scholarly identities in professional academic
writing (e.g. Hyland, 2004). Academic texts, however, are only persuasive to the extent they employ the rhetorical conven-
tions that colleagues find convincing and conventions of detachment have often overridden unequivocal interpersonality to
emphasize explicitness, objectivity and precision. However, the ways writers seek to claim solidarity with readers, evaluate
ideas and acknowledge alternative views seems to be changing to accommodate more obvious interpersonal interactions.
Impersonality in the sciences seems to be a growing rhetorical option in this genre and at least some biologists and electrical
engineers are taking advantage of this.
One consequence of our results, however, is the potential difficulties this rhetorical change creates for students and novice
writers, particularly those writing in a second language. In their study of these features, for example, Chang and Swales (1999)
found the majority of their L2 graduate samples were uneasy about the increased flexibility that greater informality might
offer. They believed that learning the rules of formal academic English was already a considerable burden and was further
complicated by changing styles which allows them to mix formal and informal language effectively. It is true that some
studies have shown that L2 English students often make considerable use of some informal features, so that Cobb (2003) and
McCrostie (2008) found substantially greater use of first and second person pronouns compared with expert prose and
Leedham (2015) found Chinese student writers made substantial use of contractions and informal connectors such as besides,
lots and what’s more in their essays. Whether these choices simply mimic conversational practices due to limited proficiency
is uncertain, but it is generally frowned upon by those assessing their writing. So while informality may seem a boon to
experienced writers, it may create additional complexities in the relationships the writer is seeking to build with readers and
further increases to the compositional burden of novices.
We are aware, of course, that research articles are carefully refined and polished and so a potential drawback of examining a
published corpus is the influence exercised by editors, copy editors and reviewers on the style of the eventual finished text.
Certainly research articles represent the hard case when considering the spread of informality in written English. But if there is a
sea change in such a rhetorically machined genre, then presumably many community gatekeepers are also subscribing to it, or at
least hesitating to require that such changes be corrected. Ultimately, of course, research articles are the sites where academics
negotiate and make sense of the issues which preoccupy them as members of particular disciplines. These sites, moreover, are
not merely storehouses of arcane, abstract practices, monolithic and forever frozen in time, but responsive to changing contexts
and the demands of new conditions. In some fields, these changes are happening before our eyes as scholars make choices to
adopt rhetorical options which seek to establish a more engaged and personal connection with their readers.
Appendix 1. Journal list
Applied Linguistics
TESOL Quarterly (1967-)
Language Learning (1948-)
Foreign Language Annals (1967-)
Modern Language Journal (1916-)
College Composition and Communication (1950-)
Sociology
American Journal of Sociology (1895-)
Social problems (1953-)
The British Journal of Sociology (1950-)
American Journal of Economics and Sociology (1941-)
The Sociological Quarterly (1960-)
Biology
The Quarterly Review of Biology (1926-)
Biological Reviews (1923-)
Radiation Research (1954-)

BioScience (1964-)
The Journal of Experimental Biology (1923-)
Electrical Engineering
Proceedings of the IEEE (1963-)
Automatica (1963-)
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1963-)
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (1966-)
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (1963-)
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Ken Hyland is Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He has published
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include disciplinary writing, corpus analysis and genre studies. His recent publication appeared in English for Specific Purposes.
"At first I thought… but I don’t know for sure": The Use of
First Person Pronouns in the Academic Writing of Novices
Teresa Thonney, Columbia Basin College
Abstract: This article describes a study of how students use first person pronouns in
papers written for undergraduate courses in multiple disciplines. If prompted, students
imitate some of the ways experts use first person to establish their authority; but just as
often students use first person pronouns to express uncertainty or to reveal that they have
less status than their audience. I argue that we can help students more closely
approximate expert practices by making them aware of how experts use first person and
by providing them with opportunities to use first person in those same ways.
One of the most obvious ways writers insert themselves into texts is through first person pronouns. The
functions these pronouns serve in academic writing range from low risk purposes, such as announcing
topics or describing research methods, to high risk purposes, such as making original claims.
Some high risk functions of first person are illustrated in the following passage from the introduction of an
article published in Geography:
In the paradigm of Hawaiian volcano evolution, stages and the timing of their [magmas']
transitions are delimited by the composition of erupted lavas. However, we present new results
from 238U-230Th and U-Pb dating of zircons from leucocratic plutonic xenoliths indicating that
lava stratigraphy is an incomplete monitor of magmatic evolution within subsurface
reservoirs. Our results indicate that diorites from Mauna Kea record postshield evolution over
tens of thousands of years when the depth of magma storage increased and highly evolved lavas
began erupting [emphasis added]. (Vazquez, Shamberger, & Hammer, 2007, p. 695)
In this passage, first person pronouns establish the writers as authorities, responsible for original research
and new knowledge (we present new results; our results indicate).
Many students, having been taught by teachers or textbooks that academic writing should be impersonal,
are reluctant to insert themselves into their academic writing in the way experts do. Some were raised in
cultures that value collective rather than individual expressions of identity. Others may use first person but
not in the ways an expert would. The passage below, for example, is also from the introduction of a paper
about the evolution of a volcano, this paper written by a student enrolled in Physical Geography 101. The
student uses first person pronouns for different purposes than we saw in the previously quoted passage:
Mount Adams is located in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and has a top elevation of
12,726 feet. I can testify to the height because I climbed every foot of that mountain. At the
time, I had thought I knew everything about Mount Adams; however, after researching Mount
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Thonney 2
Adams, I realized I knew very little. What I didn't know is that Mount Adams is the second
highest peak in Washington State and the third highest in the Cascade Range [emphasis
added]. In addition, Mount Adams is one of 20 major volcanoes created by the subduction of a
tectonic plate named Juan de Fuca… .
Like the experts, the student uses first person to make a claim, but the basis of his claim is different. When
he writes, "I can testify," he makes a claim based on personal experience; the experts, conversely, base their
claim on scientific research. Later, the student uses first person to admit the limitations of his knowledge
and to deny having any authority (I realized I knew very little). The experts use first person to take credit
for creating knowledge.
In this article, I describe the identities students create for themselves with first person pronouns, identities
that often reveal their novice disciplinary status. I argue that we can help students more closely approximate
expert practices by making them aware of how experts use first person and by providing them with
opportunities to use first person in those same ways.
How Experts Use First Person

A number of studies have demonstrated how expert academic writers use first person pronouns to make
their writing more persuasive. Nigel Harwood (2007), for example, asked political scientists to talk about
the first person pronouns in their articles and in the articles of the other scholars interviewed. The political
scientists identified seven reasons for using first person:
To include the reader

To make the writing more accessible and "friendly"
To qualify claims (I think …)
To identify research methods (I sampled …)
To announce their purpose or argument (In this essay, I will …)
To establish the originality or value of their research (We present new results …)
To insert personal comments.
Comments from the interviews highlight the role these writers believe first person pronouns play in
"ensuring their work is maximally persuasive" (Harwood, 2007, p. 45).
Harwood (2005a) found many of the same purposes for first person when he analyzed published articles
from four disciplines (Business and Management, Computing Science, Economics, and Physics). Writers
used I and we to help them convey the value of their work, to express opinions, to describe research
procedures, to announce the structure of the text, and to establish their relationship with readers. Some of
these functions involve greater risk than others. By owning their opinions, for instance, writers risk being
criticized if their ideas are later proven wrong, but they also demonstrate they have the authority to make
claims.
The expert writers Ken Hyland (2002b) interviewed, as well as the 240 journal articles he analyzed
(representing eight disciplines), revealed that many experts use first person pronouns to "promote an
impression of confidence and authority" (p. 353). When Hyland compared the journal articles to student
papers, he found that experts from across disciplines are "four times more likely to explicitly intervene with
the first person" (2002a, p. 1098, original emphasis).
The use and prevalence of first person varies across cultures, but in the academic writing of American
English, I is common, and its prominence is growing, perhaps as an acknowledgment of the role that writers
play in creating knowledge (Vassileva, 1998). In a few disciplines, such as mathematics, first person plural
"At first I thought… but I don’t know for sure" 3
is preferred, even in single-authored texts; however, generally speaking, compared to academic writing in
other languages, academic writing in English includes many more instances of I, a finding confirmed in
several cross-cultural studies (e.g., Vassileva, 1998; Mur Dueñas, 2007; Lorés-Sanz, 2011).
Although the prevalence of first person can vary by discipline (Hyland, 2002b; 2001b), within disciplines
(Harwood, 2007), and within genres (Martínez, 2005), in general the research indicates that experienced
academic writers writing in English use first person pronouns to take credit for forming hypotheses and
gathering data, as well as to own their claims and conclusions—in other words, to establish their expertise.
How Students Use First Person

When writers use any first person reference, they assert "the right to have a 'voice'" (Ivanic & Camps, 2001,
p. 25). It is no surprise, then, that when novices write to experts they don't assert the kind of authority that
experts do. This is especially true for students from cultures that value collective identity. Fan Shen (1989),
recounting his experiences as a Chinese student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has described the
difficulty he had learning to use first person as a Western writer would. In China, tradition dictates that I be
"somewhat hidden or buried in writings"; emphasizing one's self appears aggressive or "boastful" (p. 460).
In Hong Kong, the upper-level undergraduates Hyland (2002a) studied avoided using first person when "it
involved making a commitment to an interpretation or claim" (p. 1106). In interviews, many of the students
said that they were reluctant to claim personal authority and ownership. Similarly, María José Luzón (2009)
found that Spanish engineering students did not use first person pronouns to present themselves as
knowledgeable members of the discipline.
Another study indicating that students writing in other cultures are reluctant to use first person to assert
authority comes from Ramona Tang and Suganthi John (1999), who analyzed first person pronoun use in
27 essays written by first-year students in Singapore. Least powerful—and most common—were first person
plural pronouns identifying the student as belonging to a group (e.g., As we all know …). Next on Tang and
John's continuum are first person plural pronouns identifying the writer as a "guide" through the essay
(e.g., In this quotation we see an example of …). A similar identity is the writer as "architect," using first
person singular to preview the essay structure (e.g., In this essay, I will describe …). Tang and John found
this use of first person to be rare (14% of all occurrences). Another identity is "opinion-holder," using first
person to introduce an opinion or attitude (e.g., I think …; I believe … ). In the sample, four of ninety-two
first person pronouns (4.5%) served this purpose. The "most powerful role" is when first person pronouns
identify the writer as the source of an idea (p. S29). Only five first person pronouns (5.6%) served this
purpose in the corpus.
Are undergraduates in U.S. colleges any more inclined than students in other cultures to use first person
pronouns in their writing? If so, do they use first person to take credit for their opinions and interpretations
(as experts do) or do they use first person for low-risk functions only? Research addressing these questions
is sparse. So, for insights, I analyzed a sample of papers written by students enrolled in courses at a U.S.
community college. My findings suggest that, if prompted, these students imitate some of the ways experts
use first person to establish their authority, but just as often students use first person to acknowledge their
lack of authority. The findings also suggest that asking students to engage in the work of the disciplines is
one way to help them imitate expert use of first person.
The Sample
To learn how U.S. undergraduates use first person pronouns in their academic writing, I analyzed 25 papers
written for introductory courses at a Washington State community college. I originally asked 26 instructors
for a sample of student writing. Seventeen instructors responded. In order to analyze more than one writing
sample for each assignment, I eliminated from the corpus assignments for which I received only one student
Thonney 4
paper. In all, I analyzed two or three student papers from eleven non-composition courses. All papers are
high scoring, single-authored papers, written in the Fall of 2010 for 100 or 200-level courses. A list of course
titles, along with word counts, appears in Appendix A.
Most of the assignments involve analysis. For example, Chemistry and Microbiology students interpreted
experiment results; Abnormal Psychology students diagnosed eating disorders by observing patient
symptoms; Geography students interpreted seismograph readings for a volcano; and Statistics students
collected and interpreted data about a sample. Another five assignments involved analyzing a primary "text"
(a performance, film, or literary work).
Methods
To determine the frequency and distribution of first person pronouns in the corpus, I first searched the 25
papers for occurrences of I, my, me, we, our, and us. I counted only instances where the pronoun refers to
the author of the paper or, in the case of we, our, and us, to a group to which the author belongs.
Occurrences of first person pronouns that appear in quotations or do not refer to the writer or to a group
to which the writer belongs were deemed irrelevant for my purposes and were not counted.
I next determined the various rhetorical functions I serves in the student papers. Those functions include:
Making a claim (statements of interpretation, judgment, or inference)

Describing a procedure
Expressing uncertainty or doubt (i.e., acknowledging the author's limited knowledge, skill, or
expertise)
Expressing self-benefits or personal response to the topic
Demonstrating understanding to the instructor
Announcing a topic or purpose
Addressing the reader
I then re-read the papers and coded each instance of I according to its function.
To gain further insights into how students construct their relationship to their audience, I also coded each
instance of we as being either inclusive (referring to the reader and writer as members of the same group)
or exclusive (referring to a group to which the reader does not belong).
Results and Data Analysis

The sample includes 236 first person pronouns, most of them (112) in the two Biology lab reports. Table 1
indicates the frequency of first person pronouns in the student papers arranged by discipline. The most
commonly used pronoun is I (124 instances), representing 53% of all first person pronouns in the 25
papers. Weis the second most common pronoun (37 instances, or 16%), followed closely by my (33
instances).
Table 1: Frequency of First Person Pronouns
Percent of Total
Total # of
Discipline I my me we our us Words in the
Pronouns
Discipline
Microbiology (2 papers) 44 25 4 23 8 8 112 4.7%
Abnormal Psyc (2) 35 5 7 4 0 0 51 2%
Public Speaking (2) 6 0 0 1 6 2 15 1.1%
Drama (3) 10 0 4 5 0 0 19 Less than 1%
Chemistry (3) 9 1 1 1 0 0 12 Less than 1%
Race/Ethnic Relations (2) 9 1 0 0 0 0 10 Less than 1%
Geography (3) 8 0 0 0 0 0 8 Less than 1%
Art History (2) 1 1 1 1 0 0 4 Less than 1%
Music Appreciation (2) 2 0 0 0 0 0 2 Less than 1%
World Literature (2) 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 Less than 1%
Statistics (2) 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 Less than 1%
Total 124 33 17 37 15 10 236
Two factors explain the prevalence of first person in the Biology and Psychology papers. First, both
assignments ask students to interpret what they observed—in a lab or a documentary. Second, both
assignments ask students to explain how they reached their conclusions. For example, the Biology students
are directed to:
Talk about how YOUR experiments led you to identify your organisms. (original emphasis)
The Chemistry lab report assignment also asks students to interpret and evaluate their results, but the
prompt indicates that "all text should be written in 3rd person past tense" (original emphasis). Still, two of
three Chemistry papers include I in the discussion/conclusion section, suggesting that when asked to
explain how they reached conclusions, students do not hesitate to use first person. In the Geography, Art
History, Music Appreciation, and World Literature papers, conversely, first person pronouns are rare.
These assignments involve analysis and interpretation; but students drew from written sources, not visual
data.
In general, when prompted to describe methods, give interpretations, or provide personal response,
students used first person pronouns, even when directed not to in the case of the Chemistry students. But
when using textual evidence, students seem reluctant to use first person to present their opinions alongside
those of published authorities.
Thonney 6
Functions of I
Although the meaning of the pronoun I might seem unambiguous, it can construct various roles for the
writer, as Tang and John (1999) have illustrated. Some instances of I diminish rather than enhance the
writer's authority. I analyzed students' use of I to determine the function of the pronoun in the papers.
Sixteen of 25 students (64%) used I in their papers, at least one writer in nine of the eleven courses
represented in the sample. Forty percent of the occurrences of Iappear in introductions or conclusions,
where low-risk uses of I are common (e.g., to announce a topic), rather than in sections of the paper where
claims usually are made and argued. None of the four students writing in World Literature or Statistics used
the pronoun I. Appendix B includes the frequency of I in the remaining courses. In all, 124 instances
of I appear in 16 papers, most of these in Psychology and Biology. Appendix C shows the functions of I in
rank order within the sample.
The most frequently occurring function (33% of all instances of I) is to state a claim, judgment, or
interpretation. More than half of these instances appear in the two Psychology papers. The Psychology
students were asked to watch a documentary, diagnose eating disorders in patients, and recommend
treatments. Thus, students wrote sentences such as the following:
I diagnosed Brittany with binge/purging Anorexia due to the fact that … (Psychology 3)
Taking credit for an opinion or interpretation is a "high risk" function of I, because the writer could be
proven incorrect. Hyland (2002a) found this use of first person in only 8 of 64 student reports (13%).
However, in my sample, students writing in six different disciplines claimed credit for their interpretations,
all of them within assignments that explicitly ask for their opinions or that involve reporting their
observations:
I think treatment based on the addiction model will yield the best results. (Psychology 2)
I believe that the water, which is pretty heavy, added to the mass of AgCI greatly. (Chemistry 2)
I believe this production successfully accomplished its goal. (Drama 2)
Instances such as these appear in 12 of 25 student papers (48%).

The second most common function of I in the student papers is to describe research procedures, a function
common in both student and expert writing (Hyland, 2002a; Vassileva, 1998). However, in my corpus, all
instances of I serving this purpose appear in science lab reports (e.g., "Once I separated and found the
Gram-positive organism, I then followed the flow chart … " [Biology 1]). In assignments that involve
reading texts, students did not use first person to describe what they did. This mirrors the findings of Tang
and John (1999). Their students were asked to use course documents to analyze a quotation; none used first
person pronouns to relate research methods.
In other instances, the students I studied used first person in ways that reveal their novice status. The third
most common function of I was to express uncertainty or doubt. Writers in seven of the eleven courses used
first person to admit the limitations of their own knowledge, understanding, or abilities. Expressing
uncertainty was most prominent in Biology, Chemistry, and Psychology papers; these assignments asked
students to identify potential sources of error or to identify what left them confused. Given prompts
like What are you left wondering about? (in the Psychology assignment), it is no surprise that students wrote
sentences like this:
At first I thought she may be exhibiting signs of borderline personality disorder, due to her self-
mutilating behavior and her reaction to Polly's criticism of her, but I don't know for sure.
(Psychology 3)
The Biology and Chemistry students would have been inclined to express uncertainty for another reason.
They conducted experiments designed by their instructors. Unlike experts, who write for a reader who
knows less about their research than they do, these students wrote to an audience who knows the "right"
answer. In this way, the rhetorical situation found in the science assignments—and in much student
writing—is unique. This same degree of uncertainty may not appear in the writing of students who design
their own research, a point I'll return to later.
Another common function of first person in student writing—appearing in 10 of 25 papers in the sample
(40%)—is to express a personal response to or personal benefit of the assignment. Students in seven different
courses used first person for this reason. Here is an example from Biology:
This was a fun lab and I enjoyed the detective work involved with figuring out what the
organisms were. (Biology 2)
This is a function of first person not mentioned in studies of expert writing; but, again, the difference
between student and expert practice is explained by the assignment prompts. As Appendix C shows, most
of the first person pronouns appear in papers written for the Microbiology, Psychology, Race and Ethnic
Relations, Drama, and Public Speaking assignments, all of which call for personal response (e.g., "What was
the most memorable, interesting, or disturbing part of the film?"). Some of the students Hyland (2002a)
studied also used first person to express the personal benefits of their research. Most did so for the same
reason: professors asked them to reflect on their learning experience. Conversely, in 240 published research
articles, Hyland found no instances of I used by writers to express personal benefit.
Other functions of first person appear less frequently in the student papers. Three student writers (12%)—
representing Psychology and Biology—used first person to demonstrate understanding of course content.
Rather than simply describing what they did, these students described how they knew what to do (e.g., "I
knew from our class results that Kocuria rhizophila makes a capsule and so I did a simple capsule stain.").
This is a move unique to students and no doubt reflects the fact that students write first and foremost for a
grade. It is another way their rhetorical situation results in practices that differ from those of experts.
Only three instances of I in the corpus are used to announce the writer's topic or purpose, all used to identify
which topic the student selected from options the instructor provided (e.g., "The film I selected [to analyze]
was Driving Miss Daisy."). The Biology and Chemistry students wrote about an assigned subject, perhaps
suggesting to them that announcing the topic was unnecessary; however, in other assignments, students
selected from a range of topics, making the infrequency of this low-risk use of first person noteworthy.
What's also missing is first person used to forecast the structure of the paper (e.g., In this essay, I will first
describe). While Harwood (2005b) found that experts commonly use first person to announce the structure
of their papers and Hyland (2002a) found this to be the most common use of first person among upper-
level students in Hong Kong, no students in my sample used first person for this purpose. The Biology and
Chemistry reports had Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, and three other assignment prompts
delineated questions, which students answered in order. Students may not see the need for forecasting
structure when prompts provide a structure for them. Other assignments, however, such as for Art History
and Literature, direct students to narrow their scope and announce their purpose. Even in these papers,
students did not use first person to preview structure. This finding may be related to the level of writer.
Tang and John (1999) found that first-year students in Singapore also avoided first person when forecasting
essay structure, instead preferring impersonal phrases such as "This essay will show … ." The cultural
Thonney 8
backgrounds of students in my study are unknown, but they too avoided first person when forecasting the
structure of their papers.
First person used to address the reader appears only once in the sample, within the conclusion to a
Geography paper:
Mount Adams is one volcanic mountain here in Washington State that I would recommend to
visit. (Geography 2)
The unequal relationship between student and professor is no doubt why direct address is rare. In addition,
students, unlike experts, do not have to engage readers to get (or keep) an audience.
Functions of We
Expert writers often use we to establish their authority. A writer might say something to the effect of "We
see in this example …" and thus suggest that he is speaking for the discipline or speaking for both himself
and the reader. But as math professor Candia Morgan (1996) has noted, even students writing in
mathematics, where first person plural is standard, rarely use we to refer to both writer and reader. They
don't want to risk implying that they consider themselves equal with the instructor or that they are qualified
to speak for the instructor.
Within the corpus of 25 papers, we appears 37 times, far less often than I (appearing 125 times). Nineteen
of these instances (51%) are inclusive, meaning we refers to both writer and reader, but we is not used in a
way that suggests the writer considers himself equal with the instructor. Instead, the students (representing
six courses) use we to refer to all of society or to a "general" audience. Here is a typical example:
Food is so much a part of our daily lives, that we often don't give a second thought to its
presence in literary stories. (Literature 1)
Tang and John (1999) regard an instance like this, where we identifies the author as a member of society at
large, to be one of the least powerful functions of first person. Among the students they studied in Singapore,
it was the most common identity created with first person pronouns. Although it could be argued that
writers who use such instances of inclusive we claim the authority to speak for others, it's a low risk move
compared to experts' use of inclusive we.
Experts use inclusive we to establish their membership within a disciplinary community. The writer asserts
herself as qualified to speak on behalf of others in the discipline. By presuming to know what the reader
believes or thinks, the writer sees both herself and the reader "as participants with similar understanding
and goals" (Hyland, 2001a, p. 558). This is of course a difficult move for students to make, and none of the
students in my corpus used we to convey membership in a discipline, despite writing about topics they have
researched and writing to representatives of the field.
Even more striking is the contrast between novice and expert use of exclusive we. In my sample, five
instances of exclusive we appear in a single review of a play, all referring to the writer and others attending
the play (e.g., "Then we got to meet the character …" [Drama 3]). Another thirteen instances of
exclusive weappear in science lab reports. Here is a typical example:
To minimize the possibility that the silver nitrate would be the limiting reagent, we used excess
amounts. (Chemistry 1)
In this sentence, we refers to the writer and other students conducting an experiment. Although the writer
refers to a group to which the reader (instructor) does not belong, the student does not use exclusive we in
the way an expert would. In expert prose, exclusive we typically refers to the writers themselves (Kuo, 1999),
as in "We interviewed subjects… ." Here, the authors write from a position of power. They enjoy a "superior"
status because they know more about the research they describe than do readers. Students, conversely, often
use we to denote membership in a group that knows less than the reader. When the biology student writes,
"we knew which organisms were positive or negative," she refers to knowledge obtained from the instructor
who designed the experiment and thus knows much more than the writer about the organisms (including
what the organisms are). Once again, the students in this sample use first person to defer rather than claim
authority.
In two ways—to make claims and explain procedures—13 of 25 students in the sample (52%) imitated the
way experts use first person in academic writing.These expert practices were encouraged by assignment
prompts that explicitly ask students to describe their methods or give their opinions. But the broader
tendency among students, found in 14 papers (56%), was to use first person to express personal benefit,
admit limited knowledge, or demonstrate understanding to the instructor.
Discussion and Pedagogical Implications

In this sample of writing from community college students, some of the least powerful uses of first person
pronouns are among the most widely used. Unlike expert academic writers, who use first person to take
credit for new ideas, these students often used first person to express uncertainty, to describe personal
benefits, and to identify themselves as having less status than their audience. Whether or not students
writing in U.S. universities use first person in a more authoritative manner is unknown, but this sample
suggests there are several reasons community college students and experts differ in their use of first person.
First, some assignments encourage students to acknowledge their novice status. Prompts that ask students
to reflect on what confused them, for example, have pedagogical merit but prevent students from using first
person the way experts do.
Second, when assignments involve summarizing or analyzing written texts, students seem reluctant to
interject themselves into the conversation. The assignments that involved discussing written sources—
Geography, Art History, Music Appreciation, Literature, and Statistics—were among those with the fewest
first person pronouns. Perhaps students hesitate to put their opinions alongside those of the experts. Or
perhaps students associate these types of assignments with the impersonal "school reports" of high school
and do not understand that in college they are expected to contribute to the conversation.
Third, even where students are asked to write genres that resemble those used in the discipline (e.g., Biology
and Chemistry lab reports), the assignments may not require the kinds of thinking and writing experts
actually do. Alaimo et al. (2009) explain, using the example of chemistry:
Because a [student] lab report typically does not address a genuine question, it does not teach
students how scientists find questions, construct hypotheses, design experiments, or make
arguments supported by data from the experiment. Overall, while the lab report provides a
format for students to fill in as homework, it does not help students learn to think like a
chemist. (p. 19)
The lab reports in my corpus had distinct Methods, Results, and Discussion sections; but rather than
conduct authentic research, students completed an exercise for which the instructor knew the answer. As a
result, "because students know (or think they know) the expected outcome of the 'cookbook' experiments,
they chalk up any deviation from the expected outcome as 'experimental error' with little thoughtful
explanation" (Alaimo et al., p. 20).
Thonney 10
Fourth, the asymmetrical relationship between student and teacher further encourages a novice style.
Morgan (1996) describes the challenge for the student writing in mathematics, where first person plural is
expected. When a student uses first person plural, she:
constructs a reader who is also a member of the same community and is thus in some sense a
colleague… . In academic writing this assumption of mutual membership of the mathematics
community is to be expected. In the school context, however, the relationships between writers
and reader are more asymmetric. The teacher or textbook may use such conventional forms …
but for the student-writer there are tensions between the need to display her familiarity and
facility with conventional mathematical language (and hence to have the right to be considered
part of that community) and her need to satisfy other classroom demands. (p. 6)
Indeed, the first-year student who "addresses the teacher-reader with authority as a colleague may even be
perceived as arrogant" (Morgan, p. 6).
Writing to demonstrate knowledge to the teacher continues to be the norm at all levels of student writing,
as Daniel Melzer (2009) demonstrated with his national survey of college writing prompts. As in earlier
studies, including studies of secondary school writing by Britton et al. (1975) and Applebee (1984) and
studies of college writing by Bridgeman and Carlson (1984) and Eblen (1983), the majority of assignments
in Melzer's sample were written for an audience of teacher-as-examiner. In every discipline, the instructor
knows more about the subject than students do. In addition, the instructor has the power to grade the work,
making this, as Hyland (2002a) notes, "not the best forum to declare an authoritatively independent self"
(p. 1109).
How can we help students better approximate expert uses of first person pronouns? One way is to make
them aware of how experts use first person. Many students raised in the U.S. attend high schools where first
person use is discouraged (Gordon, 2007), and few writing handbooks explain the purposes first person
pronouns serve in academic writing. Hyland (2002b) recommends having students analyze the uses of first
person in the writing of their majors to determine what kind of an authorial presence is created and how.
Having students analyze their own writing is another way to raise their awareness. By coding each instance
of first person in their papers according to its function (see, for example, Hyland [2002b] or Tang and John
[1999]), students can discover "the kind of writer role that these pronoun choices suggest," and determine
the "relative authority" they claim as writers (Hyland, 2002b, p. 355, original emphasis). Students can then
compare their own "authorial profile" (p. 355) to that of expert writers in their field of study. Such exercises
make students aware of the role first person pronouns play in creating a writer's persona.
Another way to promote expert writing practices is to provide opportunities for students to write expert
genres. These are necessarily only approximations of the kinds of writing experts do—Carter, Ferzli, and
Wiebe (2007) call them "apprenticeship genres" (p. 295)—but writing them changes the way students learn,
write, and think about course content. In the sample described here, most first person pronouns used in
expert ways appear where students are asked to write apprenticeship genres (i.e., lab reports with Methods,
Results, and Discussion sections). But these students also used first person to identify their lack of
knowledge, in part, because they were writing to an audience that knows the "right" answer. If students
instead are allowed to engage in genuine inquiry, to design and describe research that they know more about
than does their audience, they will have greater authority to use first person in the ways experts do. There
is no denying the merit of assignments calling for metacognitive reflection, but if we want students to
imitate the way experts think and write, they also need opportunities to imitate the work of discipline
insiders. Assignments with predetermined questions and answers deprive students of the impetus writer-
researchers have when they write.
Even first-year students can conduct original research. In my own first-year composition courses, students
conduct textual analysis studies using a corpus of first-year student papers I provide and/or the Michigan
Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (available at http://micusp.elicorpora.info/). Their goal is to learn

something about student writing across the curriculum; many choose to contrast the writing of first-year
and graduate students. Students have, for example, analyzed the images, forecasting, documentation,
selection of sources, quality of paraphrasing, and presentation of source material (i.e., paraphrasing vs.
quoting) in student papers. Students design their own studies, usually modeled after one of the studies they
discuss in their Literature Review section (studies I help them locate). Original research reports are unlike
the expressive writing that students regard as "personal" and unrelated to the "intellectual work" of any
discipline (Bergmann & Zepernick, 2007, p. 130; see also Beaufort, 2007). Examples of original research
projects appropriate for undergraduates studying in any discipline are easy to find in the journals of the
field.
Many features of expert writing appear when students do the kinds of work academics do. I conducted a
computer search of 38 IMRAD-style research reports written by my composition students during the past
two terms. First person pronoun use was not discussed in class; still, first person pronouns appear in 34 of
the student papers (89%), used in ways one would expect in expert research reports. Most students used
first person in their statements of purpose (e.g., "I analyzed," "I hypothesized," "I set out to learn") and in
their description of methods. Notably, none of the students used first person to identify the limitations of
their own knowledge, understanding, or abilities, but many used first person to assert their authority. For
example, they used first person to place their research into the context of previous studies:
With some inspiration from [X], I have formulated a study to answer this research question.
[X] found that students who used framing got a higher score than students who didn't, and
after doing my own study I can see how their results make sense.
To identify the value of their research:
The gap I hope to fill in my research is …
I believe that this is important to talk about because …
To state findings:
I found that there is more hedging in the graduate student papers, especially in the Biology
reports.
I determined that undergraduate writers tend to use fewer questions in their writings than
graduate writers.
To explain findings and to make original claims:
The reason this number could be so high is because of my small sample size as well as the
courses that were analyzed.
I believe that this [finding] is due to the experience [the graduate students] have … .
Other features of academic writing (e.g., qualifying claims; using disciplinary vocabulary; presenting data
in figures and tables) emerge naturally when students describe their own research, or they can be "required"
by instructors who assign genres where these features are expected.
Thonney 12
Designing and reporting original research has additional benefits for students. In their long-term study of
college students, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz (2004) found that an important "paradigm shift" occurs
among the successful students, a shift "more likely to occur when faculty treat freshmen as apprentice
scholars, giving them real intellectual tasks that allow students to bring their interests into a course" (p. 140;
see also Alaimo et al., 2009). Students recognize the difference between expert genres and "school genres,"
and they see greater value and meaning in disciplinary writings, perhaps because they recognize the
"authenticity" of the apprenticeship genres (Carter, Ferzli, & Wiebe, 2007, p. 298; also Wardle, 2004). When
students describe original research, they are cast in the role of experts instructing the reader on something
the reader does not know. Further, when students produce rather than report knowledge, they become
more aware of the social construction of knowledge, enhancing their ability to critically read research
findings.
When Flower and Hayes (1980) used "think-aloud protocols" to determine how expert and novice writers
define writing problems and discover ideas, they found that "an audience and exigency can jolt a writer into
action, but the force which drives composing is the writer's own set of goals, purposes, or intentions" (p.
27). Flower and Hayes concluded that:
People only solve the problems they represent to themselves. Our guess is that the poor writers
we studied possess verbal and rhetorical skills which they fail to use because of their
underdeveloped image of their rhetorical problem. Because they have narrowed a rhetorical act
to a paper-writing problem, their representation of the problem doesn't call on abilities they
may well have. (p. 30)
Rather than being a "paper-writing problem" (a student task), original research assignments are researcher-
writer problems (expert tasks). We may not be able to change the asymmetrical relationship of the student
writing for evaluator. But we can allow student writing to have a purpose beyond telling the instructor what
he or she already knows. Assignments that involve observation, textual analysis, interviews, small-scale
surveys, or other primary research convey to students that "the research-based writing most highly valued
in university settings doesn't merely summarize facts from other sources, but uses those other sources as
springboards for original research to test previous findings and create new knowledge" (Sutton, 2000, p.
447).
Readers make inferences about writers based on the identity they "construct" for themselves, and first
person pronouns play an important role in revealing how writers perceive both themselves and their
relationship with readers. Before novices can learn to use first person and other linguistic features in the
ways that experts do, however, they must be given opportunities to do the kind of writing that allows them
to approximate those uses.
Appendix A - Papers in the Corpus

Course Title Number of Texts Number of Words*
Abnormal Psychology 2 2329
Acting-Beginning 3 2882
Art History 2 3295
General Chemistry 3 2972
Introduction to Statistics 2 587
Microbiology 2 2408
Music Appreciation 2 2452
Physical Geography 3 1363
Public Speaking 2 1327
Race and Ethnic Relations 2 2054
World Literature 2 2218
Total 25
* When determining the length of papers in the sample, only words in running text were counted. Words in titles and
headers, captions and content of tables and figures, and references were not counted.
Thonney 14
Appendix B - Frequency and Location of I in Student Papers

Occurrences of I (total Occurrences of I in Number of Words in
Course Title
number) Intro or Conclusion Paper
Abnormal Psychology 1 21 6 1349
Abnormal Psychology 2 14 11 980
Art History 1 1 0 2003
Art History 2 0 0 1292
Chemistry 1 0 0 912
Chemistry 2 6 6 1092
Chemistry 3 3 3 968
Drama 1 2 0 1137
Drama 2 4 4 479
Drama 3 4 0 1266
Geography 1 0 0 580
Geography 2 8 7 577
Geography 3 0 0 206
Microbiology 1 14 0 976
Microbiology 2 30 1 1432
Music Appreciation 1 2 0 1095
Music Appreciation 2 0 0 1357
Public Speaking 1 1 0 685
Public Speaking 2 5 3 642
Race and Ethnic Relations 1 5 5 902
Race and Ethnic Relations 2 4 4 1152
Total 124 50
Appendix C - Rhetorical Functions of I in Student Papers

Art
Function Bio. Chem. Drama Geog. Music Psych. Speech Race/Ethnic Total
Hist.
Make a Claim 0 3 2 6 0 0 22 5 3 41
Describe Procedure 0 35 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 36
Express Uncertainty 1 4 6 1 3 0 5 0 2 22
Relate Personally 0 1 0 3 4 2 5 1 2 18
Show Understanding 0 1 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 3
Introduce Topic 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 3
Address Reader 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1
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Contact Information
Teresa Thonney
Department of English
Columbia Basin College
Pasco, WA 99336
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (509) 542-5539
Complete APA Citation

Thonney, Teresa. (2013, March 18). "At first I thought… but I don't know for sure": The Use of First
Person Pronouns in the Academic Writing of Novices. Across the Disciplines, 10(1). Retrieved from
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/articles/thonney2013.pdf

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Teaching the Conventions of

> Teresa Thonney

e347-362-May11-TE.indd 347 4/23/11 10:19 AM

348 TETYC May 2011

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1. Academic Writers Respond to What Others Have Written about

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350 TETYC May 2011

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3. Academic Writers Acknowledge That Others Might Disagree with the

352 TETYC May 2011

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4. Academic Writers Adopt a Voice of Authority

Using First or Third Person

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354 TETYC May 2011

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5. Academic Writers Use Academic and Discipline-Specific Vocabulary

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6. Academic Writers Emphasize Evidence, Often in Tables, Graphs, and

356 TETYC May 2011

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Suggestions and Conclusion

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Akuthota,Venu, et al. “The Effect of Long-Distance Bicycling on Ulnar and Me-

358 TETYC May 2011

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