Disciplinary discourses: writer stance in research articles

Examining features of stance in a corpus of research articles, this chapter suggests that choices of rhetorical strategy depend on relations between participants, and that the writer's stance is at least partially influenced by the social practices of his or her academic discipline. This preliminary characterisation of academic stance thus reveals some of the rhetorical knowledge needed for effective argument in different disciplines. The chapter also argues that the choices made by individual writers not only help create an authorial style but represent awareness of the conventional socio-discursive practices of their disciplinary communities. The discursive practices employed by members of particular disciplinary communities are merely socially authorised conventions, not strict rules of conduct, and therefore constrain rather than determine linguistic choices. It shows that effective academic writing depends on rhetorical decisions about interpersonal intrusion and involves writers' selecting and deploying community-sensitive linguistic resources to represent themselves, their positions and their readers.