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Ken Hyland
The view that academic writing is persuasive is not news. It dates back
accounts of it, the efficacy of logical induction, and the role of social
natural and human world is actually like and this, in turn, serves to
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cultural authority, free of the cynicism with which we view the partisan
and every successful text displays the writer’s awareness of both its
them.
method and prestige on its users, it implies all that is most objective
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and empirically verifiable about academic knowledge, and has been
writing as a means of simply dressing the thoughts one sends into the
falsifiability, and the text merely the channel which allows the scientist
not the case that if the premises of an inductive inference are true
then the conclusion must be true, for by moving from the particular to
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statements about the unobserved, we must acknowledge uncertainty
scientific claims.
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accurate representations of what the world is like because this
know/say about it, and they must therefore draw on principles and
justification for our ideas that is somehow `objective',’, and this leads us
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Interaction as persuasion: socially constructed knowledge
through the actions of situated writers, and are persuasive only when
producing agreement.
ratification of one's work, the fact that ``truth” does not lie exclusively
in the external world means that knowledge can only emerge from a
interpretation of any piece of data and more than one way of looking
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In sum, effective persuasion requires an awareness of the cognitive and
of their likely responses. This means that all claims have to display a
proper respect for colleagues and due regard for their views and
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authorized institutional practices in order to appeal to readers from
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systematic scrutiny of relationships between a limited number of
how it builds on what has come before (Becher, 1989; Hyland, 1998b).
sections I will examine some of these patterns and outline how they
boosters. Hedges (1) are items such as possible, might, and believe
opinion rather than as a fact (Hyland. 1996, 1998). Boosters (2), on the
other hand, mark the expression of certainty and emphasise the force
of a proposition.
(2) It is indeed the case that the same more inclusive standards of
political citizenship have been extended not only to women but also
to children, and arguably, to fetuses. (Soc)
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(3) This particular result is undoubtedly attributable to the
impending incorporation of Hong Kong into the People's Republic
of China. (Mk)
mark involvement with the topic (Chafe, 1986) and indicate solidarity
(3) It is my hope that this model will facilitate further inquiry into
. . . (AL)
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. . ..the time step must be checked for each iteration using the
Courant-Freidrichs-Lewy criterion to ensure numerical stability.
(ME)
(4) Now let us consider equation (8a) and form the scalar product
(EE)
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In addition, writers use person markers to acknowledge the
The table below shows the distribution of over 300 stance markers
Totals
markers iI 39.5 / 41.5 55.4 1 33.1 20.7 ! 23.4 24.3 / 26.4
and tightly structured, for example, means that writers can make use
(6) ..one may suggest that discussing the moral and social merits
of .. . (SOC)
philosophers, while engineers employed them sparsely and they did not
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papers, but here they tended to stress the strength of warrants in
itself more clearly. Not only does the lower use of attitude and relational
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character only through commenting on what readers should attend to,
The writers of soft papers on the other hand tend to persuade with a far
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there is a marked preference for the use of ``abstract rhetors'', which
In the soft disciplines writers were more likely to indicate the subjectivity
conjecture:
the use of person markers. The decision to use first person can help
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to be disciplinary preferences however, for the verbs most commonly co-
authorial presence.
with verbs conveying reasoning and possibility in the humanities and social
sciences. In the soft papers we find personal intrusion being used to refer
contrast. in the engineering and science papers the first person was
mainly used to construct the text and present decisions, rather than take
..we concur with Baumgardner and Tongue (I 988: 136) who call it.. .
(AL)
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In this case we rewrite the former two expressions of equation (25)
as . . . (ME)
Clearly the role of the first person offers the writer complex
evaluate information and writers to gain acceptance for their work Once
reasonableness.
involves constructing a text using devices that best position the writer
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section I will briefly review a number of other discursive strategies that
writers use for both promoting their work and for demonstrating
disciplinary competence.
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Introductions in the humanities/social science texts more often
problem is therefore often a major way that writers in the soft fields
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Representing the topic as important to the community is often
for example, do not directly address the focus under study, but the
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Instead of demonstrating the relevance of their research by invoking
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Traditionally, philosophers have explored two possibilities. (Phil)
(21) Our results help explain why consumers value price guarantees
(e.g., offering to refund the difference if a customer finds the
brand at a lower price within 30 days) and performance
guarantees (e.g., offering free upgrades on software for 12
months). (Mkt)
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The structure function, however, may help us very efficiently to
identify the different subregions of the heat-flow path from their
contribution to the overall response. (EE)
to look mainly for new results to further develop their own research
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In sum, readers make judgements about claims based on their
knowledge of the topic and how it is being handled, and part of this
Conclusion
been the subject of long philosophical debate (eg. Pera & Shea, 1991).
Part of this debate has involved the extent to which epistemic and
here some of the ways that particular discursive practices are used to
accomplish this.
References
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1989). Styles of stance in English: lexical and
grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text 9(1), 93-124.
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origins and role in development . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hawking, S. ( 1993). Black holes and babv universes and other essays.
New York: Bantam.
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Chickering (Ed.), The modern American College (pp. 232-255). San
Fransico: Jossey Bass.
Pera, e., & Shea, W. (eds). (1991). Persuasing science: The art of
scientific rhetoric. Canton, MA: Science History Publications.