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1. Hyland, K. (2005) A convincing argument: corpus analysis and academic persuasion. In Connor, U. & Upton, T.
(Eds.) Discourse in the Professions: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp 87-114.
A convincing argument: corpus analysis and academic persuasion
Ken Hyland
The view that academic writing is persuasive is not news. It dates back at least as far as Aristotle and is
widely accepted by academics themselves. The ways that this persuasion is achieved however is more
contentious, and raises a number of important issues, not least those concerning the relationship between
reality and accounts of it, the efficacy of logical induction, and the role of social communities in con-
structing knowledge. In the past decade or so analyses of academic corpora have brought new empirical
insights to these enduring debates in epistemology and the sociology of science, challenging the role of
induction or falsification and emphasising the importance of rhetorical practices in academic persuasion.
In this chapter I discuss how a specialist corpus of research articles has been used to explore these prac-
tices across a range of disciplines. My argument will be that close analysis of academic discourse re-
veals something of how academic knowledge is, at least in part, constructed through the discoursal
actions of community-situated writers, and that this understanding is important for language teachers.
Academic discourse and scientific explanation
There is a widespread belief that academic discourse is a unique form of argument because it depends
upon the demonstration of absolute truth, empirical evidence or flawless logic. Its persuasive potency
is seen as grounded in rationality and based on exacting methodologies, dispassionate observation, and
informed reflection. Academic writing, in other words, represents the discourses of ‘Truth’ (Lemke,
1995: 178). It provides an objective description of what the natural and human worlds are actually like
and this, in turn, serves to distinguish it from the socially contingent. We see this form of persuasion
as a guarantee of reliable knowledge, and we invest it with cultural authority, free of the cynicism with
which we view the partisan rhetoric of politics and commerce.
This view receives its strongest support from those who champion the explanatory methods of the
hard sciences. Science is held in high esteem in the modern world precisely because it is seen to pro-

2. vide a model of rationality and detached reasoning. The label ‘scientific’ confers reliability on a meth-
od and prestige on its users, it implies all that is most objective and empirically verifiable about aca-
demic knowledge. For these reasons it has been imitated by the fields of human and social inquiry,
such as sociology and linguistics, which are often considered ‘softer’ and thus less dependable forms
of knowledge. Underlying this realist model is the idea that knowledge is built on the non-contingent
pillars of impartial observation, experimental demonstration, replication, and falsifiability. Conse-
quently, scientific papers are persuasive because they communicate independently existing truths
which originate in our direct access to phenomena in the external world. The text is merely the chan-
nel which allows scientists to relay observable facts.
But scientific methods provide less reliable bases for proof than commonly supposed. Although we
rely on induction in our everyday lives, believing that the bus we take to work will pass by at 8am to-
morrow if it has passed at 8am every day for the past week, it has received short shrift from philoso-
phers of science. They argue that observation does not supply a secure basis for science because by
moving from observations of particular instances to general statements about unobserved cases, scien-
tists introduce uncertainty. The widely accepted alternative, Popper’s ‘Falsification’ model, which puts
theories through experimental testing and replaces those that are defective with more verifiable ones,
is similarly unreliable. It is simply not possible to conclusively falsify a hypothesis because the obser-
vations that form the basis for the falsification must be expressed in the language of some theory, and
so will only be as reliable as that theory. That is, all reporting occurs within a pragmatic context and
in relation to a theory which fits observation and data in meaningful patterns, so there is no secure ob-
servational base upon which any theories can be tested (Chalmers, 1978).
The problem for both inductivism and falsification is therefore that interpretation depends on the as-
sumptions the scientist brings to the problem (eg Kuhn, 1970). Observations are as fallible as the theo-
ries they presuppose, and so cannot provide a solid foundation for the acceptance of scientific claims.
As the physicist Stephen Hawking (1993:44) notes, a theory may describe a range of observations, but
“beyond that it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality
is independent of a theory”. Texts cannot therefore be seen as accurate representations of ‘what the

3. world is really like’ because this representation is always filtered through acts of selection and fore-
grounding. To discuss results and theories is not to reveal absolute proof, it is to engage in particular
forms of persuasion.
In fact, because all reporting involves the interpretation of observations and data, knowledge can only
emerge from a disciplinary matrix. Writers cannot step outside the beliefs or discourses of their social
groups to find justifications for their research that is somehow ‘objective’. They must draw on princi-
ples and orientations from their cultural resources to organize their work, and this grounds academic
persuasion in the conventional textual practices for producing agreement. Simply, if truth does not
reside in an external reality, then there will always be more than one plausible interpretation of any
piece of data, and this plurality of competing explanations shifts attention to the ways that academics
argue their claims. Academic corpora play a crucial role here by helping to show how research find-
ings are rhetorically transformed into academic knowledge.
Because writers can only guide readers to a particular interpretation rather than demonstrate proof,
readers always have the option of refuting their interpretations. At the heart of academic persuasion,
then, is writers’ attempts to anticipate possible negative reactions to their claims. To do this they must
display familiarity with the persuasive practices of their disciplines, encoding ideas, employing war-
rants, and framing arguments in ways that their potential audience will find most convincing. They
also have to convey their credibility by establishing a professionally acceptable persona and an appro-
priate attitude, both to their readers and their arguments. In sum, persuasion in academic articles, as in
other areas of professional life, involves the use of language to relate independent beliefs to shared
experience. Writers galvanise support, express collegiality, resolve difficulties, and negotiate disa-
greement through patterns of rhetorical choices which connect their texts with their disciplinary cul-
tures.
In this chapter I use a corpus of research articles to explore three key elements of persuasion in aca-
demic writing, looking at citation, interaction and self-mention. These are all important realisations of
the research writer’s concern for audience and have been the subject of speculation and interest by rhe-

4. toricians and linguists for some years. In fact, the ways that writer’s establish their credibility (or cre-
ate an ethos) and consider readers’ potential attitudes to the argument (pathos) date back to Aristotle.
This chapter therefore seeks to ground these timeless concepts in the actual behaviour of real writers
and the ways they engage their disciplinary peers in webs of interaction and persuasion.
A research article corpus
A corpus approach brings a distributional perspective to linguistic analysis by providing information
about the relative frequency of items and the ways they are used, pointing to systematic tendencies in
the selection of meanings. Corpora thus reduce the burden of evidence that is often placed on intui-
tions to show how particular grammatical and lexical choices are regularly made. More than this, how-
ever, corpus analyses show that writing is characterised by impressive regularities of pattern with
endless variation (eg. Sinclair, 1991; Stubbs, 1996), and that lexical and grammatical features are not
only likely to vary across registers (eg. Biber et al, 1999), but also across disciplines as language using
communities (Hyland, 2000).
The corpus on which the work in this chapter is based recognises this need for diversity and was com-
piled to represent a broad cross-section of academic practice. It reflects the belief that all texts reveal
their writers’ assumptions about their readers, shaped by prior texts, repeated experience, and by orien-
tations to certain conventions. It assumes that persuasion is not simply accomplished with language,
but with language that demonstrates legitimacy as writers draw on institutional practices which appeal
to readers from within the boundaries of their discipline. The corpus has been used to study a range of
features including citations (Hyland, 2003), directives (Hyland, 2002a), questions (Hyland, 2002b),
authorial pronouns (Hyland, 2002c), and engagement features (Hyland, 2001).
The corpus comprises 240 published papers, three from each of ten leading journals in eight disci-
plines. The fields were mechanical engineering (ME), electrical engineering (EE), marketing (Mk),
philosophy (Phil), sociology (Soc), applied linguistics (AL), magnetic physics (Phy) and molecular
biology (Bio). The journals were nominated by discipline informants as among the leading publica-

5. tions in their fields, and the articles were chosen at random from current issues. These texts were
scanned into a machine-readable form, producing an electronic corpus of 1.3 million words (Table 1).
Insert table 1 here
While frequency and collocational data provide descriptions of existing practice, telling us what writ-
ers do, to stop here runs the risk of reifying conventions rather than explaining them. The text data
were therefore supplemented with interviews with experienced researcher/writers from the target fields
to obtain participant perspectives on disciplinary practices. These typically began with detailed exami-
nations of text extracts to explore what writers had tried to achieve with specific choices. These dis-
course-based interviews (Odell, Goswami, and Herrington, 1983) seek to make explicit the tacit
knowledge or strategies that writers and readers bring to acts of composing or reading. The interviews
then moved to more general observations which focused on subjects’ impressions of disciplinary prac-
tices, but allowed them to raise any other relevant issues. These were conducted using a semi-
structured format of open-ended prompts (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2000), allowing subjects to
respond to texts as readers with insider community understandings, while also discussing their own
discoursal preferences. Interviews were recorded and transcribed and then analysed recursively, look-
ing for key ideas and patterns across respondents.
An approach to analysis
The corpus was searched for specific features related to particular aspects of writer-reader interaction
using WordPilot 2000 (Milton, 1999), a text analysis and concordance programme. Analysis of dis-
course features is necessarily time-consuming and labour-intensive, involving several passes through
the data and careful checking of each item in its larger sentential or textual context to ensure that each
case represents an example of the target function. Concordances are important as they display all oc-
currences of a feature in its immediate co-text, usually with instant access to the wider text, which en-
ables functions to be identified and ambiguities clarified. Checking concordance lines is therefore a
recursive procedure to narrow down, expand and combine initial general categories. In each of the
analyses reported here I made several sweeps of the data to weed out irrelevant examples, ensure accu-
rate counts and identify recurring pragmatic functions.

6. It should be clear that there is nothing particularly esoteric in this. The chapters in this book show that
corpora are approached in many ways, but I use a corpus to assist, rather than drive, research and there
is nothing here that could not feasibly, if more tediously, be done with a pencil. This is a way of cod-
ing data that, while influenced by the researcher’s theoretical knowledge and experience, ensures that
the categories are relevant to the research issues and, as far as possible, emerge from the data itself.
The approach produces categories that are:
♦ Conceptually useful: in that they help to answer research questions
♦ Empirically valid: in emerging from the data itself
♦ Analytically practical: being easy to identify, specific, and non-overlapping
I should point out that coding needs careful validation to avoid simply reflecting the researcher’s pre-
conceptions. Swales (1981: 13) recognised the danger of this twenty years ago when he cautioned that
“the discourse analyst labels something as x and then begins to see x occurring all over the place”. To
avoid this kind of bias, samples of data were always coded by another rater working independently.
The goal here is to ensure that there is a high degree of inter-rater agreement, that is, that both analysts
see the same thing.
Similar procedures were used with the interview material, recursively passing through the tapes and
transcribing what seemed to be key aspects. In some cases the qualitative data analysis programme
WinMax Pro (1998) was used for cross-referencing and drawing connections between interviews from
different fields. These were then related to the text data to illuminate the patterns observed there. The
objective was to bring insiders’ understandings of what it is they do when they read and write in their
disciplines to the analysis. Participant accounts are suggestive of writers’ experiences of the activities
they routinely engage in and add considerably to what we are able to say about texts, allowing us to see
the factors which might contribute to disciplinary meanings.
Academic persuasion and disciplinary practice
Corpus analysis shows that these disciplinary meanings are achieved through regularities in the rhetor-
ical conventions of reporting which are, at the same time, influenced by the knowledge making prac-

7. tices of the disciplines. Discoursal conventions are persuasive because they are significant carriers of
the epistemological and social beliefs of community members. So while individual disciplines, and
sub-groupings within disciplines, have their own preferences concerning theoretical approaches, ex-
planatory procedures, research techniques, rhetorical practices, and so on, analysis suggests that we
can see knowledge as collectively constructed within the broad cognitive and procedural understand-
ings of hard and soft knowledge domains.
The concept of hard and soft fields carries connotations of clear-cut divisions, risking reductionism by
packing a multitude of complex abstractions into a few simple opposites. But this categorisation is di-
rectly related to established disciplinary groupings (Becher, 1989), and gains support from studies
which suggest that it may actually represent participant actors’ own perceptions of their practices
(Biglan, 1973; Kolb, 1981; Hyland, 1999a & 2000). While the hard-soft distinction is by no means
clear cut, it does offer a useful way of examining general similarities and differences between fields.
The hard knowledge disciplines can be seen as predominantly analytical and structuralist, concerned
with quantitative model building and the analysis of observable experience to establish empirical uni-
formities. Explanations thus derive from precise measurement and systematic scrutiny of relationships
between a limited number of controlled variables. Knowledge is characterised by relatively steady
cumulative growth, problems emerge from prior problems and there are fairly clear-cut criteria of what
constitutes a new contribution and how it builds on what has come before (Becher, 1989; Hyland,
2000). Soft knowledge disciplines, in contrast, often concern the influence of human actions on events.
Variables are therefore more varied and causal connections more tenuous. These fields tend to employ
synthetic rather than analytic inquiry strategies and exhibit a more reiterative pattern of development
with less scope for reproducibility (Becher, 1989: 12-17; Kolb, 1981).
These polar distinctions obviously cannot capture the full complexity of disciplinary differences, but
they do provide a useful basis for identifying dimensions of variability between fields. They are espe-
cially valuable if we picture them as the extreme ends of a continuum along which disciplines and
their sub-fields are arrayed with varying degrees of correspondence to either end. The important issue

8. here is not whether some disciplines are entirely one or the other, but whether these distinctions have
effects which are reflected in writers’ preferred patterns of persuasion. In what follows I will examine
some of these patterns, drawing on the corpus discussed above to detail a number of the linguistic and
rhetorical practices by which academics demonstrate their professional credibility and the value of
their work to their disciplines.
Connecting to textual frameworks: Citation as persuasion
One of the most obvious strategies for situating research within disciplinary expectations is through
appropriate citation practices (Hyland, 1999; Thompson & Ye, 1991). Citation is central to the social
context of persuasion as it helps provide an intertextual framework for new work, allowing the writer
to construct an effective justification for an argument and demonstrate the novelty of his or her posi-
tion (Gilbert, 1977). By acknowledging previous research, writers are able to display an allegiance to a
particular community or orientation, create a rhetorical gap for their research, and establish a credible
writer ethos (Swales, 1990). In sum, citation is a major indication of a text’s dependence on a discipli-
nary context, helping writers to demonstrate familiarity with the field and establish a persuasive epis-
temological and social framework for their arguments.
Corpus analysis shows, moreover, that the frequency and use of citation differ according to different
rhetorical contexts, influenced by the ways particular disciplines see the world and tackle research.
Table 1 gives an idea of these variations in a 80 paper sub-corpus of the corpus discussed above, con-
sisting of one paper from each of the journals sampled (Hyland, 1999). The figures show that the arti-
cles in philosophy, sociology, marketing and applied linguistics together comprised two thirds of all
the citations in the corpus, twice as many as the science disciplines, with engineering and physics well
below the average.
Insert table 2 here
An important feature of hard knowledge is that research occurs within an established theoretical
framework which provides the imperative and explanatory schema for new findings (Kolb, 1981;
Kuhn, 1970). Writers are able to presuppose a certain amount of background and to co-ordinate re-

9. search using a highly standardized code in place of an extensive system of references (cf Bazerman,
1988). Citation is therefore a means of integrating new claims into a scaffolding of already accredited
facts. References are often sparse and tend to be tightly topic-bound which helps to closely define a
specific context of knowledge and contributes to a sense of linear progression. In the soft disciplines,
however, this kind of linearity and predictability is relatively rare as writers retrace others’ steps and
draw on a literature which is more dispersed and open to greater interpretation. Readers cannot be as-
sumed to possess the same knowledge and writers often have to pay greater attention to elaborating a
context through citation. The more frequent citations in the soft texts therefore suggest greater care in
firmly situating research within disciplinary frameworks, reconstructing the literature to demonstrate a
plausible basis for their claims.
In addition to the greater frequency of citation in the soft fields, these writers also give more promi-
nence to the cited author through use of integral structures and by placing authors in subject position:
(1) Weinstein (1993) suggests that the critical thinking movement may well be part of … (AL)
Sherin (1990) argues that police agencies establish triage systems whereby… (Soc)
Baumgartner and Bagozzi (1995) strongly recommend the use of … (Mkt)
Writers in the hard disciplines on the other hand tend to reduce the role of the author with non-integral
and numerical-endnote formats:
(2)Furthermore, it has been shown [103] that the fundamental dynamic range of … (EE)
As already observed by others [17], T1 was found to be … (Phy)
Refs [12-19] work out the theory of spatial kinematic geometry in fine detail. (ME)
One reason for this is that persuasion at the hard end of the continuum tends to suppress the actions of
human actors in constructing knowledge and to emphasise the authority of scientific procedure.
Downplaying the perspective of human judgement in the interpretation of data gives the impression of
nature revealing itself directly. So by removing the agent, writers remove any implication of human
intervention, with all suggestion of personal interest, social allegiance, faulty reasoning and other dis-
torting factors. It also suggests that the person who publishes a claim is immaterial to its accuracy,
encouraging the idea that scientific persuasion is based on writers discovering truth, not making it.

10. At the softer end of the continuum, however, in the humanities and social science papers, persuasion
requires high author visibility. Knowledge is constructed through a personal dialogue with peers, ra-
ther than by extending the thread of knowledge from previously established truths. The extensive use
of citation and author mention thus help to achieve a high degree of personal involvement among ac-
tors while positioning the writer in relation to views that he or she supports or opposes. This was made
clear by several of my disciplinary informants during the interviews:
Citing allows you to debate with others, the questions have been around a long time, but you
hope you are bringing something new to it. You are keeping the conversation going, adding
something they haven’t considered. (Phil interview)
I’ve aligned my self with a particular camp and tend to cite people from there…. It’s a kind of
code, showing where I am on the spectrum. Where I stand. (Soc interview)
Persuasion in the humanities and social science articles also utilises far more, more varied, and more
argumentative, reporting verbs, than in the hard sciences, reflecting persuasive practices which more
readily regard explicit interpretation, speculation and complexity as legitimate aspects of knowledge.
This is most apparent in the greater use of citation verbs involving verbal expression (3) and cognition
(concerned with thought and perception) (4). Both of these types facilitate qualitative arguments:
(3) Baddeley proposes a tripartite system of working memory,… (AL)
As Hinde (1979) points out, many unhappy marriages remain intact because of… (Mkt)
Jacoby accuses American intellectuals of a turn to conservatism,... (Soc)
(4)Acton (1984) sees preparing students psychologically as a… (AL)
Aguirre and Baker (1990) conclude that racial discrimination has become… (Soc)
Donnelan believes that for most purposes we should take….. (Phil)
In contrast, the physics and engineering papers together contained only nine cognition verbs, thereby
masking the role of author interpretation in the research process. Instead, choices in the hard sciences
emphasise acts of research, placing a persuasive accent on real-world activities to convey an experi-

11. mental explanatory schema. Knowledge is more likely to be shown as proceeding from laboratory ac-
tivities rather than the interpretive operations of researchers:
(5) The reasons for this are examined in detail by Yeo et al (1990), … (Bio)
…a “layer” coupled-shot finline structure was studied by Mazur [7] and Tech et al [8] .. (Phy)
... using special process and design [42], or by adding [101], or removing [83] a mask. (EE)
Finally, Eto et al. (1994) reviewed and analyzed the contents of several indicators,.. (ME)
Citation thus plays an explicitly persuasive role in academic persuasion and corpus analysis helps
show some of the ways that textual conventions are not simply stylistic proclivities, but represent dis-
tinctions in how knowledge is typically negotiated and confirmed in academic communities. The re-
sults here show far higher use of ‘manifest’ intertextuality in the soft knowledge fields and suggests an
evidential schema more dependent on the establishment of an explicit integration of new and existing
material.
Interaction and engagement: reader-oriented features
Another significant dimension of persuasion in research papers is the writer’s projection of the percep-
tions, interests, and needs of a potential audience into a discourse. Any text anticipates a reader’s re-
sponse and itself responds to a larger discourse already in progress, so argument incorporates the
active role of an addressee and is understood against a background of other views on the same theme
in prior texts (Bakhtin, 1986). This is most obviously achieved when writers use explicit text features
to address readers directly.
A list of 85 items providing potential surface feature evidence of reader engagement based on previous
literature was compiled and their patterns and frequencies explored in the 240 article corpus. These
showed the use of inclusive, second person, and indefinite pronouns and asides to address readers di-
rectly as participants in an argument, effecting interpersonal solidarity and membership of a discipli-
nary in-group. The main purpose of these reader appeals seems to be primarily interpersonal and
acknowledges the need to meet readers’ expectations of inclusion. Another group of features, mainly
questions, directives and references to shared knowledge, are used to pull the audience into the dis-

12. course at key points and guide them to particular interpretations. This second purpose is more con-
cerned with rhetorically positioning the audience, recognising the reader’s role as a critic and potential
negater of claims by predicting and responding to possible objections and alternative interpretations.
While these two broad functions are not always distinct, they help to show more clearly the uses of
rhetorical persuasion and to compare the patterns of engagement across disciplines.
Table 3 summarises the distribution of devices initiating such interactions across disciplines, with
reader pronouns and directives amounting to over 80% of all features.
Insert table 3 here
The results show some interesting cross-discipline similarities, but most obvious are the disciplinary
variations, where, for example, philosophers employed ten times more devices than biologists. In gen-
eral, more reader-oriented markers were found in the discursive soft fields, particularly reader pro-
nouns, questions and asides. This symmetry was upset by the physicists who joined philosophers,
sociologists and applied linguists in a relatively high use of inclusive we pronouns and explicit refer-
ences to shared assumptions. Directives tended to comprise the highest proportion of features in the
hard sciences. I will briefly the most frequent engagement features, pronouns and directives here.
Readers are most explicitly addressed as discourse participants by the use of personal pronouns, most
commonly inclusive we. The clearest acknowledgement of the reader’s presence, second person you
and your, occur only rarely, suggesting that writers generally seek to reduce distance from their audi-
ence, minimizing any implication that the writer and reader are not closely linked as members of the
same disciplinary community. Where we do find second person and indefinite pronouns, then, writers
use them to construct both the writer and the reader as participants with similar understanding and
goals. It also sets up a dialogue between equals in which the potential point of view of the reader is
woven into the fabric of the argument, articulating the thoughts and counter-claims of fellow profes-
sionals. The persuasive nature of this strategy often extends into explicitly spelling out the conclusions
the writer wants the reader to draw:
(6) The reader will note the use of the passive voice when referring to …. (AL)

13. To this end, we remind the reader that in the case of the nonrelativistic hydrogenic atom a similar
situation occurs. (Phy)
Furthermore, one has to consider that splice variants may alter the transactivation…. (Bio)
Laying stress on their membership, their joint affiliation to a community-situated pursuit of knowledge
is an important way that writers give persuasive weight to their texts, as my informants pointed out:
Part of what you are doing in writing a paper is getting your readers onside, not just
getting down a list of facts, but showing that you have similar interests and concerns.
That you are looking at issues in much the same way they would, not spelling every-
thing out, but following the same procedures and asking the questions they might have.
(Bio interview)
I picture an ideal reader. Someone who is curious about the same kinds of issues, moti-
vated by the same problems. I try and make that clear in the way I write, as if I am talk-
ing to a colleague, to someone I know. (Soc interview)
In particular, inclusive we is heavily used to bind writer and reader together as members of a discipli-
nary in-group:
(7) Classical electromagnetic theory [9] tells us that a couple of potentials, A, V may be … (EE)
…on what basis do we (who call ourselves applied linguists) decide to include … (AL)
We know, however, it is only in the last few years that Weber and Simmel have … (Soc)
But while the inclusive pronoun presupposes a certain communality, it can also be employed to guide
readers towards a preferred interpretation, shading into explicit positioning of the reader. While stress-
ing the involvement of writer and reader in a shared journey of exploration, it is always clear who is
leading the expedition:
(8) Now that we have a plausible theory of depiction, we should be able to answer the question of
what static images depict. But this turns out to be not at all a straightforward matter. We seem,
in fact, to be faced with a dilemma. Suppose we say that static images can depict movement.
This brings us into conflict with Currie's account,…… (Phil)

14. While pronouns work persuasively to establish solidarity and engage readers in the discourse, other
strategies, most often directives, draw readers into the text in order to position them. Directives in-
struct the reader to perform an action or to see things in a way determined by the writer (Hyland,
2002a) and are typically realised in three main ways: by the presence of an imperative (9); by a modal
of obligation addressed to the reader (10); and by a predicative adjective expressing the writer’s
judgement of necessity/importance controlling a complement to- clause (6):
(9) Consider now the simple conventional reflection effect in a magnetic interface (Phy)
Note that the regular-verb experiments constitute the only relevant test…. (AL)
(10) What we now need to examine is whether there is more to constancy than this. (Phil)
…..we must identify the principal screws Sx and Sp. . (ME)
(11) As marketers, however, it is important to understand how the information …. (Mkt)
Hence it is necessary to understand the capacitive coupling of the devices to the metal gates. (Phy)
There is a clear reader-oriented focus to these statements, recognizing the dialogic dimension of re-
search writing and directing readers to some action or understanding. But while often seen as an im-
position on addressees, it is clear that this is not always the case. An analysis of co-texts in the corpus
reveals that directives can be classified according to three main type of activity they direct readers to
engage in (Fig 1). Textual acts, refer readers to another part of the text or to another text; Physical
acts instruct readers to engage in either a research process or real world action; Cognitive acts steer
readers to certain lines of thought, either by leading them through a line of reasoning, elaborating an
argument, or emphasizing a point (Hyland, 2002a).
Insert Figure 1 here
It is difficult to pick out clear disciplinary patterns from these functional distributions in the corpus.
The summary in Table 4 shows a noticeable division between hard and soft fields in the proportion of
directives collocated with physical acts, and in fact over 80% of all cases occurred in the science texts.

15. The soft disciplines, with the exception of philosophy, contained more textual directives, which meta-
discoursally guide readers through a discussion. Only biology in the hard sciences contained high fre-
quencies of these uses, mainly and steer readers to tables or examples within the same text.
Insert table 4 around here
It is worth noting here that directives comprised 61% of all the reader-oriented devices in the hard
fields, compared with only 25% in the soft papers. Directives are therefore a major rhetorical feature
in the sciences, partly because they offer an economy of expression highly valued by information-
saturated scientists, but also because they allow writers to engage and lead an audience through an ar-
gument to a particular conclusion without expressing a clear authorial identity:
(12) Note the transverse stress acts to fracture the monolith along the flow direction. (ME)
The analysis given in our paper should be considered in the context of a …. (Phy)
It is necessary to take into account the dT'/dUp derivative when calculating the … (EE)
Outside philosophy, cognitive directives are less frequently employed in the soft fields, perhaps be-
cause requiring readers to act or see things in a certain way more clearly violates the fiction of equality
in published research writing. A greater number of directives thus tend to be citational in the soft
fields, a less threatening role than those which explicitly tell readers how to interpret an argument.
Taken together, these features are important ways of situating academic arguments in the social inter-
actions of members of disciplinary communities. Through their use of directives, personal pronouns,
interjections, questions, and so on, we can recover something of how writers construct their readers by
drawing them into both a dialogue and a relationship. Once again, these features represent relatively
conventional ways of making meanings and the considerable disciplinary variations helps elucidate
different contexts for interpretation, showing how writers and readers make connections, through
texts, to their disciplinary cultures.

16. Self-mention and academic promotion
A final feature of research article persuasion I want to touch on briefly here is the extent to which
writers explicitly intrude into their discourse to assert their personal involvement and professional
credibility. In addition to supporting their arguments with reference to prior work and engaging read-
ers in appropriate ways, writers must also control the level of personal projection in their texts. This
not only contributes to how writers display their disciplinary competence, but also helps ensure that
readers recognize their individual contribution and their assertion of academic priority. Perhaps the
clearest indication of the writer’s self-presentation is the use of self-citation and first person pronouns.
Once again, corpus analysis reveals disciplinary uses which suggest that choices are at least partially
influenced by the social practices of academic disciplines.
Table 5 shows the results of a study of all exclusive first person pronouns (I, me, my, we, us, and our)
and cases of self-citation the 1.3 million word corpus (Hyland, 2002d). Clearly, academic writing is
not the faceless prose it is often depicted to be and, along with abstraction and high information con-
tent, human agents are integral to their meaning. Overall, there were roughly 28 expressions of self-
mention in each paper; 81% of these were pronouns (predominantly we and I), 16% were self-
citations, and 2% were other mentions to the authors of the paper.
Insert table 5 around here
Once again, we see that what constitutes admissible argument differs between communities. Self-
mention is particularly dense per 10,000 words in physics, marketing, and biology, and while mechan-
ical engineers may refer to themselves far less often, they rely heavily on self-citation in linking their
work into the disciplinary fabric. When we ignore text length and look at raw scores, we find that
some 69% of all cases of self-mention occurred in the humanities and social science papers, with an
average of 38 per article, compared with only 17 in science and engineering (Table 6). This was large-
ly due to the much greater use of first person pronouns in the soft disciplines.
Insert table 6 around here

17. Self-citation is a prominent feature of the science and engineering papers where it made up almost
11% of all references, compared with only 5% in the soft fields, and constituted 60% of all expres-
sions of self-mention. Self-citation is obviously an important means of demonstrating one’s discipli-
nary credibility, and is perhaps the strongest demonstration a writer can make to establish his or her
claim to be seen as an important player in a field and to have work taken seriously. The frequency var-
iations of self-citation however also indicate conventions which reflect underlying differences in dis-
ciplinary research practices.
The fact that issues in the humanities and social sciences tend to be comparatively diverse and de-
tached from immediately prior developments means that there are perhaps less opportunities for self-
citation. As I noted above, references in sciences and engineering tend to be tightly bound to a particu-
lar research topic. This is mainly because scientists tend to participate in highly discrete and special-
ised areas of research, partly as a result of the heavy investments in specialised know-how and
technical equipment that hard knowledge production often requires, and partly because of the rapid
expansion of knowledge. These factors coerce scientists into a niche of expertise from where they can
make precise contributions, allowing writers to draw on their own work to a considerable extent:
A paper in biology is not just a one off bit of isolated research. Projects tend to be ex-
pensive and may take a long time to set up and produce anything important. What we
write up probably reports a piece of research that may be going on for years. We are
continuously building on what we’ve done. (Bio interview)
We aren’t just blowing our own trumpets here. There just aren’t that many people doing
work in this particular field. (Phy interview)
There are also substantial differences in how first person pronouns are employed across disciplines,
both in overall frequency and in preferred patterns of use. Table 5 shows that almost ¾ of all cases
occurred in the humanities and social science papers, once again reflecting the different ways academ-
ics in different fields conduct research and persuade readers to accept results.

18. Generally speaking, hard knowledge tends to be universalistic and conceptual, so research usually
consists of conducting experiments to propose solutions to specific disciplinary problems. Here writers
can rely on familiar procedures and relatively clear criteria, allowing them to downplay their personal
role in the research and highlight the phenomena under study, the replicability of research activities,
and the generality of the findings. An impersonal style subordinates their own voice to that of nature
and suggests research outcomes would be the same irrespective of the individual conducting it. In con-
trast, the different objects and methods of study in soft fields mean that self-mention is a valuable
strategy for conveying an appropriate degree of confidence, reliability, and authority. Arguments are
more explicitly interpretive and the success of authors in gaining acceptance for their claims depends
to a larger extent on their ability to invoke an intelligent, credible and engaging persona (Hyland,
2000). The use of self-mention is here related to the desire to present oneself as an informed and relia-
ble colleague, strongly identifying oneself with a particular view to gain credit for one’s individual
perspective or research decisions.
In addition to the frequency of self-reference, the points at which writers choose to make themselves
visible in their texts also have considerable rhetorical importance, indicating what they are prepared to
make commitments to and what they seek to claim credit for (Hyland, 2003). The analysis revealed
four main purposes, listed here with some examples from the corpus:
♦ Stating a goal or outlining the structure of the paper
In this article we re-examine the two-dimensional particle in a box and derive the…. (Phy)
In section 1, I shall explain how PDP works. In sections II-IV, I shall consider three …. (Phil)
♦ Explaining a procedure
We analysed the effect of the thermal couplings on the properties of an operational amplifier (EE)
We transferred the proteins onto nitrocellulose membranes and incubated with … (Bio)
♦ Stating results or making a claim
We have demonstrated that MCP can be used to form single- and multiple-helical … (ME)
We found that more subjects mentioned beneficial and imagery attributes …. (Mkt)

19. ♦ Elaborating an argument
But my point here is that these laws are not enough for a complete vindication of Relevance. (Phil)
It is in this spirit that I offer my own contribution to the debate. I want to set out a slightly….(Soc)
Table 7 shows that over half of all uses of the first person in the hard papers was related to setting out
the methods used, while in the soft fields it was also often employed to present results and arguments.
Insert table 7 around here
There was an overall tendency for the first person to collocate with verbs conveying reasoning and
possibility in the humanities and social sciences, where explicit self-mention seeks to establish a con-
fident personal authority in elaborating arguments. In the hard sciences, self mention was heavily as-
sociated with describing research activities. Author prominence here reminds readers that personal
judgements have been made as a way of asserting the writer’s professional credentials:
(13) Rather than attempt to prove the frequency matching concept mathematically, we elected to
model the dynamic process occurring in a pulse combustor, and then….. (ME)
To assist in the interpretation of serial sections, we used a Kontron image analyzer and … (Bio)
We made the electrical connection to the microcoils with fine gold wire and silver epoxy. (EE)
More than in any other function, however, the use of self-mention to personally stake a claim suggests
a conscious strategy to manage the reader’s awareness of the writer’s role. This is where writers can
construct an explicitly accountable stance or to conceal the interpretative practices behind their ac-
counts. By strongly linking themselves to their claims, writers are able to solicit recognition for both.
(14) I suggest that this arises largely because of the extreme powerlessness of … (Soc)
In short, we demonstrate that what consumers know about a company can influence their ...(Mkt)
For the study of ageing in society, I would argue that they can not give us that access. (AL)

20. To summarise, despite the strong feelings it often generates among teachers and textbook authors, self-
mention is important because it plays a crucial role in mediating the relationship between writers’ ar-
guments and their discourse communities. It allows academics to emphasise their personal credibility
and their contribution to the discipline by linking themselves closely to their work to create an identity
as both disciplinary servant and persuasive originator. The fact that self-citations are higher in the sci-
ences and first person mentions in the humanities and social sciences once again reflects the very dif-
ferent contexts in which knowledge is constructed.
Conclusions and teaching implications
The issue of how persuasion is accomplished in research writing has been the subject of long philo-
sophical debate (eg. Pera & Shea, 1991). Part of this debate has involved the extent to which epistem-
ic and rhetorical factors can be distinguished; whether it is possible to separate truth-construction from
the consensus achieved by techniques of persuasion. In this chapter I have argued that induction and
falsification are poor resources for gaining access to natural and human realities, and that knowledge
has to be seen as a rhetorical construct. I hope to have shown how corpus analysis has contributed to
our understanding of the ways persuasion is socially created in research articles, a view which also, of
course, has important implications for teachers of English in academic and professional contexts.
First this view emphasises that persuasion depends on overcoming numerous rhetorical problems.
Writers must not only identify a valued disciplinary issue and report their study of it, they must also
demonstrate its significance and locate it within a disciplinary context through citation, adopt an ap-
propriate authorial stance towards it, and engage effectively with readers. Essentially, successful aca-
demic writing depends on the individual writer’s projection of a shared professional context and the
construction of effective social interactions. This places language, or rather language that carries cred-
ibility, at the heart of learning to become a member of a disciplinary community. Simply, students and
teachers cannot regard writing as an activity tacked on to the real business of research, a mere ‘writing
up’ of something which happens elsewhere in the lab or the library. Corpus analysis shows us that the
linguistic features we teach are no more regularities of academic style than they are a representation of

21. reality. It encourages us to assist learners to embed their writing in a particular social world which is
reflected and conjured up through recognised discourses
Second, corpus analysis confirms that the discourses of the academy do not form an undifferentiated,
unitary mass but comprise a variety of subject-specific literacies. It reveals that the ways writers pre-
sent their arguments, control their rhetorical personality, and engage their readers reflect the different
social and epistemological preferences of their disciplines (Hyland, 2000). By showing learners that
literacy is relative to the beliefs and practices of social groups, teachers are able to provide them with a
way of understanding the discoursal diversity they encounter at university. This view helps teachers to
reveal the variability which labels such as ‘academic English’ disguise and which, by divorcing lan-
guage from context, mislead learners into believing that academic literacy is an autonomous and non-
contestable way of participating in academic communities. In short, analyses of this kind underline
the fact that academic writing does not involve mastering a set of transferable rules, but manipulating
rhetorical options in ways that readers will find persuasive. Specific instruction in these practices is
essential for students to develop the skills they need to participate in particular academic contexts.
Third, and more specifically, the analyses discussed here have stressed the interactive and interperson-
al dimensions of academic writing. Effective academic writing depends on appropriate language
choices, but we often tend to focus our teaching on those options that affect ‘meaning’ rather than
those that give an impression of the writer or help negotiate claims with readers. I have sought to
stress the importance of acknowledging the active role of readers and engaging them in community-
specific ways, both to build a credible argument and to construct a disciplinary context. Increasingly
we are learning that such interpersonal aspects of writing are not simply an optional extra to be
brushed up when students have gained control of summarizing, synthesising, handling referencing
conventions, and so on: they are central to academic argument and to university success.
Fourth, and finally, the analyses suggest the value of instruction which promotes rhetorical conscious-
ness raising, both of students’ own writing in order to critically evaluate their practices, as well as the
expectations of their disciplines and the features to be found in expert texts. Subject teachers can be

22. helpful here in providing students with interview data on their practices and impressions of discipli-
nary conventions (Johns, 1997). Centrally however, consciousness-raising must involve a focus on
texts, and this can be achieved by students conducting mini-analyses of features in the genres they
have to write, most simply with a highlighter pen, or by using classroom concordancers such as
WordPilot 2000 or MonoConc. This allows students to discuss how target features are used, why they
are used, and how these uses differ from field to field, from the guidelines offered in textbooks, and
from expert writing. The purpose of these tasks is not to turn students into linguists, but to stimulate
their curiosity and direct their attention to features of writing in their disciplines, enabling them to rec-
ognise both the choices available to them and their impact.
The use of specialised corpora have provided important insights into the ways that discursive practices
are used to accomplish persuasion in research articles. We are beginning to realise that the features
writers select are always relative to a particular audience and social purpose, and their success in
achieving these purposes ultimately depends on analysing readers and engaging with them in appro-
priate ways. Through the study of features such as citations, self-mention, directives, personal pro-
nouns, and so on, we can recover something of how writers construct their readers by drawing them
into a dialogue, learn how writers make connections through texts to their disciplinary cultures, and
assist students to communicate effectively.
References
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and written English. Harlow: Pearson.
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plied Psychology, 57(3), 204-213.
Chalmers, A. F. (1982). What is this thing called science? 2nd
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Gilbert, G. (1977). “Referencing as persuasion”. Social Studies of Science, 7, 113-22.
Hawking, S. (1993). Black holes and baby universes and other essays. New York: Bantam.
Hyland, K. (1999). “Academic attribution: citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge”.
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Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. London: Long-
man.
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nication. 18 (4): 549-574.
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Hyland, K. (2002c) “Authority and invisibility: authorial identity in academic writing”. Journal of
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University Press.
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Table 1: Text corpora
Disciplines Texts Words Disciplines Texts Words
Molecular Biology 30 143, 500 Sociology 30 224, 500
Mechanical Eng 30 114, 700 Philosophy 30 209, 000
Electronic Eng 30 107, 700 Marketing 30 214, 900
Magnetic Physics 30 97, 300 Applied Linguistics 30 211, 400
‘Hard’ fields 120 463, 200 ‘Soft’ fields 120 859, 800
Table 2: Comparison of citations by discipline (Hyland, 1999)
Rank Discipline Av. Per paper per 1000 words Total Citations
1 Sociology 104.0 12.5 1040
2 Marketing 94.9 10.1 949
3 Philosophy 85.2 10.8 852
4 Biology 82.7 15.5 827
5 Applied Linguistics 75.3 10.8 753
6 Electronic Engineering 42.8 8.4 428
7 Mechanical Engineering 27.5 7.3 275
8 Physics 24.8 7.4 248
Totals 67.1 10.4 5,372

25. Table 3: Frequency of reader features per discipline (per 10,000 words) (Based on Hyland 2001)
Discipline Reader Directives Questions Shared Asides Totals
Pronouns knowledge
Philosophy 110.1 26.1 14.4 9.9 2.2 162.7
Sociology 22.5 15.8 6.7 4.2 1.8 51.0
App Ling 19.1 19.5 4.9 5.5 1.4 50.3
Marketing 11.3 12.6 3.3 3.8 1.4 32.4
Physics 20.9 21.1 1.0 5.2 0.3 48.5
Elect Eng 9.5 29.0 0.0 3.9 0.0 42.3
Mech Eng 4.5 19.9 0.9 3.0 0.1 28.4
Biology 1.1 13.0 1.0 1.3 0.0 16.4
Overall 28.9 19.0 5.0 4.9 1.1 58.9
Fig 1: Categories of directives
Internal reference --- See section 1; Refer to example 2.
Textual acts
External reference --- See Smith, 1990
Research focus --- the temperature must be set at....
Directive Physical acts
Real-world focus --- you should ask your teacher
Rhetorical purpose -- consider, suppose, let’s examine
Cognitive acts Elaborative purpose --Let X = b, this should be seen as
Emphatic purpose --- it should be noted that, remember
Table 4: Summary of directive functions by discipline (%)
Discipline Textual Physical Cognitive Textual Physical Cognitive
Biology 55.7 22.2 22.1 Marketing 52.2 8.2 39.6
Physics 24.4 29.8 45.8 Philosophy 16.3 2.8 80.9
Electronic Eng 11.6 40.0 48.4 App Ling 55.3 10.0 34.7
Mechanical Eng 13.1 33.6 53.3 Sociology 68.1 2.5 29.4
Av Hard Fields 26.2 31.4 42.5 Av Soft fields 48.0 5.9 46.1
Increasing
imposition

26. Table 5: Frequency of self-mention (per 10,000 words)
Discipline Totals Citations Mentions Discipline Totals Citations Mentions
Biology 56.2 22.6 33.6 Marketing 61.3 6.9 54.4
Physics 49.2 8.7 40.5 Philosophy 52.7 3.1 49.6
Electronic Eng 49.0 11.9 37.1 App Ling 51.8 4.5 47.3
Mechanical Eng 26.5 11.3 15.2 Sociology 47.1 6.8 40.3
Av Hard Fields 45.7 14.4 31.3 Av Soft fields 53.2 5.4 47.8
Table 6: Frequency of self-mention per text (%) by Field type
Domain Totals Citations Mentions
Hard Fields 17.6 (31.6) 5.6 (59.1) 12.1 (26.1)
Soft fields 38.1 (68.4) 3.9 (40.9) 34.2 (73.9)
Overall 27.9 (100) 4.7 (100) 23.2 (100)
Table 7: Functions of self-mention (%)
Total Bio Phy EE ME Phil Soc AL Mkg
Function Raw %
Explaining a procedure 400 38 57 46 50 49 5 26 39 44
Stating results or claim 273 26 19 19 15 18 30 28 25 26
Elaborating an argument 220 21 15 17 20 14 41 20 25 19
Stating a goal/ structure 158 15 9 18 14 18 24 26 11 11
Totals 1051
Percent 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100