Hyland, K. &Salager-Meyer, F. (2008). Science writing. In Cronin, B.

(ed) Annual Review of

Information Science and Technology. Vol 42: 297-338

Scientific Writing

Ken Hyland, University of London

Françoise Salager-Meyer, Universidad de Los Andes

1. Why is scientific writing so interesting?

Writing is a key element in the formation of social realities, institutions and personal

identities in almost every domain of professional life, and the sciences are no exception. While

often regarded as simply a conventional means of conveying the results of laboratory

experiments or armchair cogitation, scientific writing has come to be seen as socially constitutive

of the disciplines, of individual status and authority and of knowledge itself. In research articles,

monographs, textbooks, scientific letters and popularisations, the ways writers present their

topics, signal their allegiances, and stake their claims displays their professional competence in

discipline-approved practices. It is these practices, and not abstract and disengaged beliefs and

theories, that principally define what disciplines are and how knowledge is agreed and codified

(e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Hyland, 2000a & 2006; Myers, 1990).

Successful academic writing depends on the individual writer’s projection of a shared

professional context. Writers seek to embed their writing in a particular social world which they

reflect and conjure up through approved discourses. As a result, the genres of the academy have

attracted increasing attention as they offer a rich source of information about the social practices

of academics. Kress (1989, p. 7), for example, argues that discourses are “systematically-

organised sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of an institution”.

Texts, in other words, are socially produced in particular communities and depend on them for

1
their sense so that by studying the ways academics write, we learn more about disciplinary

inquiry and how knowledge is constructed, negotiated and made persuasive.

Writing is also significant to analysts for the simple reason that what academics

principally do is write. Latour and Woolgar (1979), for example, have suggested that the modern

research lab devotes more energy to producing papers than discoveries, and that scientists’ time

is largely spent in discussing and preparing articles for publication in competition with other

labs. The popular view of the academic as a solitary individual experimenting in the laboratory,

collecting data in the field, or wrestling with ideas in the library, and then retiring to write up the

results, is a modern myth (cf. Cronin, 2005). Research is a social enterprise and written texts are

the principle embodiment of this. This growing interest in academic writing has therefore been

accompanied by an interest in how academics write, rather than simply what they write about.

When we look at academic texts closely, we see that they are not just distinguished by specialist

topics and vocabularies, but by different appeals to background knowledge, different means of

establishing truth, and different ways of engaging with readers.

Scientific writing has principally been studied from four perspectives:

• Applied linguists have largely focused on the informational, rhetorical, cross-linguistic

and stylistic organisation of written texts for descriptive or pedagogic purposes (e.g.,

Hyland, 2000a; Swales, 1990)

• Information Scientists have focused on the role of texts in the classification,

manipulation, retrieval, and dissemination of information (e.g. Cronin, 2005)

• Historians, together with several applied linguists, have been interested in the rhetorical

evolution of the research article (Salager-Meyer 1998a; Salager-Meyer & Defives, 1998;

Shapin 1984)

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 • Sociological studies have sought to explore the interactions between scientists for evi-

dence of the processes which maintain social order (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984; Knorr-

Cetina, 1981).

This review article seeks to offer an analytic and critical overview of research on

scientific writing from a largely linguistic perspective. This perspective, we believe,

complements the interests of those working in Information Science, with its central concern with

the literatures involved in scholarly communication through bibliometrics, citation analysis and

information retrieval. Such studies have long drawn upon insights from linguistic theory and

analysis as a means of understanding knowledge, and our discussion is an attempt to systematize

the sources of these insights. We leave it to readers of this journal how they might appropriate

and employ the approaches and research we report. In the paper we take a broad view of

scientific to include the natural, social and human sciences, and understanding writing principally

as research writing but also including instructional and student writing, we first briefly discuss

the significance of writing to the academy and then go on to look at research into its key features

from generic, disciplinary and cross-linguistic perspectives.

2. The importance of science writing

In this section we briefly sketch the three key ways in which academic writing is

important, both to academic communities and to society at large. First, describing its role in

academic persuasion and the construction of knowledge; second, in legitimizing the ideological

and political authority of science in the modern world; and third, in establishing an

institutionalized system of hierarchy, reputation and reward through publication.

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 2.1 Writing, persuasion and the limits of scientific explanation

Scientific writing is often privileged as a unique form of argument where the text is

merely the channel which allows scientists to communicate independently existing truths,

relaying directly observable facts to the world. The label ‘scientific’ confers reliability on a

method and prestige on its users, it implies all that is most empirically verifiable about academic

knowledge and is seen to provide a description of what the natural and human worlds are

actually like. This, in turn, serves to distinguish it from the socially contingent. Academic

writing, in other words, represents a discourse of ‘Truth’ (Lemke, 1995, p. 178) and 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’, 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.

Unfortunately, none of these offers a reliable means of knowing the world as all reporting occurs

in a disciplinary context. Interpretation depends on what the mind allows the eye to see, and this

is determined by the theories and assumptions the scientist brings to the problem (eg Kuhn,

1970). Simply, texts cannot be seen as accurate representations of ‘what the world is really like’

because this representation is always filtered through acts of selection and foregrounding. In

other words, to discuss results and theories is not to reveal absolute proof; it is to engage in

particular forms of argument.

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. Knowledge is not a privileged

representation of reality, but a conversation between members of academic communities who

4
have some agreement on the ground rules for negotiating what counts as plausible. We must see

knowledge as emerging from a disciplinary matrix and ground our understandings of academic

persuasion in the conventional textual practices for producing agreement (Hyland, 1998b,

2005b).

The first reason for studying scientific writing therefore concerns its role in the

disciplinary construction of knowledge. All academic writers must display familiarity with the

persuasive practices of their disciplines: encoding ideas, employing warrants, framing arguments

and conveying an appropriate attitude to their readers and their ideas, in ways that their potential

audience will find most convincing (Hyland, 2000a, 2005a; Swales, 1990). 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. Through texts, writers galvanise support, express

collegiality, resolve difficulties, and negotiate disagreement through patterns of rhetorical

choices which connect their texts with their disciplinary cultures.

2.2. Writing and the ideological authority of the sciences

The second reason for taking an interest in scientific writing is that the discourses of the

academy are extremely valued and influential ideological systems in the wider community.

Science is held in high esteem in the modern world precisely because it provides a model of

rationality and detached reasoning. Of course there can be public scepticism about science, but

we tend to distinguish it from the socially contingent and invest it with a cultural authority not

bestowed on the more obviously partisan rhetorics of politics, journalism and commerce.

Importantly then, academic discourses possess cultural and political authority because of the

5
control they afford over the physical and intellectual circumstances of our lives. It is a means for

producing truth, and in every society power is based on truth.

This, however, is a discourse which promotes a universe in which the domination of

nature is linked to the domination of humans, used to both justify power relations and to conflate

a particular view of knowledge as truth. In other words, the discourses of the academy are not

merely credible systems of making meaning but are extremely valued and influential ideological

systems in the wider community. The words of science are, in the words of Stanley Aronowitz

(1988), the “discourse of the late capitalist state”:

Science is a language of power and those who bear its legitimate claims, ie, those
who are involved in the ownership and control of its processes and results, have
become a distinctive social category equipped with a distinctive ideology and
position in the post-war world.
The languages of the academy have, in fact, reshaped our entire world view, becoming the

dominant mode for interpreting reality and our own existence. They exert a considerable,

although often unnoticed, influence on all aspects of our everyday lives, as Halliday and Martin

(1993, p. 11) observe:

Every text, from the discourses of technocracy and bureaucracy to the television
magazine and the blurb on the back of the cereal packet, is in some way affected by the
modes of meaning that evolved as the scaffolding for scientific knowledge. In other
words, the language of science has become the language of literacy.

The fact that the influence of scientific discourses has spilled into other domains of life–

bureaucracy, government, commerce, etc. - means that they increasingly provide both a model

for communication and a filter for perception.

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 Of greatest importance is the role of academic disciplines in offering schemata of what is

known and how it can be known. Disciplines contain alternative, even deviant, perspectives, but

dominant ideologies have tended to promote a mechanically materialist view of the world

directed to utility and composed of individuals passively subject to forces outside their control.

Such narratives of human and natural phenomena successfully obscure the social relations

behind them because elements are abstracted from their social contexts, thereby offering little

threat to existing social relations. Stephen Jay Gould (1998), for example, has pointed to the

strength of a discourse of evolution where diversity and stability are suppressed to represent a

fixed progression. This helps to construct a picture of social and technological evolution as a

march of uninterrupted progress to the present, supporting an ideology of comfortable progress

and predictability which justifies current political and social realities.

In sum, the application of scientific discourse to justify social relations is inherently

ideological as it serves to endow those relations with nature’s authority. Disciplinary discourses

are not only powerfully authoritative accounts of human and natural phenomena; they also have

significant political consequences as they desensitize us to the socially situated nature of expert

assertions.

2.3 Writing and academic careers

A final aspect of the significance of scientific writing we want to mention here is the way

it works to distribute social power and individual prestige within a community. When they

write, academics not only negotiate community knowledge, individual contributions and

personal credibility, they also produce and sustain status relationships, exercise authority and

reproduce interests which help distribute influence and resources. The institutionalised system

7
for both creating knowledge and distributing rewards is that of publication. A paper is judged as

a contribution by an audience of colleagues who are potentially in a position to make use of it. If

editors, referees, proposal readers, conference attendees, and journal readers regard it as original

and significant, allow it to be published, cite it in their own work, and develop it further, then the

writer receives the reward of recognition in the form of promotion, tenure or greater access to

grants and consultancies.

Hagstrom (1965) has analyzed this process as a form of barter where recognition is

exchanged for a contribution of information. Latour and Woolgar (1979), shifting this market

metaphor and echoing Bourdieu’s (1991) notion of symbolic capital, see academics as engaged

in converting different kinds of ‘credit’ in a cycle of moves designed to maximize their

credibility. A successful publication may help a researcher gain credit which can be converted

into a research grant to finance equipment and recruit colleagues. This, in turn, generates more

data which can be converted to arguments, fresh publications, and so on. This model perhaps

attributes an unrealistically high degree of autonomy to individual practitioners and under-

estimates the effect of political and economic forces in academic life. It is true, however, that

academics who excel in the publication process often gain appointments to key positions, access

to economic resources, and the occupation of major gatekeeping roles for funding applications

and research contracts (Becher, 1989, Cronin, 2005). They not only achieve social power within

their disciplines, but form an elite as greater resources flow to them to further their work.

Writing therefore becomes both a cohesive and a competitive force, giving coherence and

public prestige to disciplinary endeavour while sanctioning rivalry between individuals,

institutions and disciplines for scarce resources. With regular research assessment exercises and

the publication of university league tables in a growing number of countries around the world,

8
publication ‘productivity’ has become a crude measure of worth while individual careers hang on

the length of personal bibliographies. James Watson, Nobel laureate and a member of the

biology establishment, spells this out:

It starts at the beginning. If you publish first, you become a professor first; your future

depends on some indication that you can do something by yourself. It’s that simple.

Competitiveness is very dominant. The chief emotion in the field.

(Quoted in Judson, 1995, p. 194)

In sum, through peer review and editorial intervention, disciplines seek to ensure that

accounts of new knowledge conform to the broad rhetorical practices they have established,

while writers tend to employ these practices to get published and achieve recognition. This desire

to gain a reputation therefore acts as a system of social control as it encourages conformity to the

approved discursive practices of the discipline. To put it bluntly, the ideological and discursive

system which reproduces knowledge also reproduces a particular arrangement of social relations.

This kind of control has been shown in a number of studies, from the editorial power exercised at

a major U.S. writing conference (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995) through the complex rhetorical

strategies needed to gain a hearing for the idea of chaos theory (Paul & Charney, 1995) to the

ways brilliant insights from outsiders are often neglected by scientific hierarchies (Sacks, 1998).

Restricting access to prestigious discourses is a commonplace in all areas of professional

life. This process of drawing on appropriate rhetorical resources to negotiate ideas is, of course,

particularly difficult for writers whose native language is not English and whose academic norms

may not be those of the discipline in the metropolitan ‘center’ (e.g., Canagarajah, 1999, 2002b).

9
 In the following sections we look at some of the ways that these discourses are realised in

different genres, disciplines and languages.

3. Genre variation in academic writing

Academic communities have developed rhetorically effective and discipline-distinctive

ways of constructing plausible accounts of research. Such conventional, socially recognised

ways of using language are referred to as genres and the analysis of academic genres has been

the staple of applied linguistic research into scientific writing for the past 20 years (e.g.,

Flowerdew, 2002; Hyland 2000a, 2000, 2005a; Swales, 1990, 2004). Genre theories rest on the

idea that texts are similar or different and can be classified as one genre or another. In order to

systematise these classifications, research has set out to characterise various key linguistic and

rhetorical features of particular genres.

Genre analysis is based on two central assumptions: that the features of a similar group of

texts depend on the social context of their creation and use, and that those features can be

described in a way that relates a text to others like it and to the choices and constraints acting on

text producers. Language is seen as embedded in (and constitutive of) social realities, since it is

through recurrent use of conventionalised forms that individuals develop relationships, establish

communities and get things done. Genres are then, “the effects of the action of individual social

agents acting both within the bounds of their history and the constraints of particular contexts,

and with a knowledge of existing generic types” (Kress, 1989).

Essentially genre analysis is the study of situated language use in institutional settings,

although analysts differ in the emphasis they give to either context or text: some focus on the

roles of texts in social communities (e.g., Blyler & Thralls, 1993), and others on the ways that

10
texts are organised to reflect and construct these communities (Hyland, 2002a & b; Johns, 2002).

As a result, academic genres have been studied in three main ways. First, as typified rhetorical

actions using ethnographic methods to relate language use to social structures and individual

identities (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Prior, 1998). Second, as regularities of staged, goal-oriented

social practices employing text analytic methods to explicate the distinctive rhetorical steps, or

moves, of genres together with their typical lexical, grammatical and cohesive patterns (e.g.,

Halliday & Martin, 1993). Third, genres have been analysed as a class of communicative events

employed by specific discourse communities whose members share broad communicative

purposes (Johns, 1997; Swales, 1990, 2004).

A range of written academic genres have been studied in recent years. These include

article abstracts (Salager-Meyer, 1990; Swales, 1990), scientific letters (Hyland, 2000a),

acknowledgments (Cronin 1995; Giannoni, 2002, 2006; Hyland, 2004a; Hyland & Tse, 2004b;

Salager Meyer et al. 2006a), theses (Bunton, 2002; Hyland, 2004a; Hyland & Tse, 2004a, 2005),

book reviews (Hyland, 2000a; Motta-Roth, 1998; Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza 2004; Salager-

Meyer et al., 2006b; Tse & Hyland, 2006), conference abstracts (Swales, 1995) and student

essays (Johns, 1997), as well as various ‘occluded’, or hidden, genres such as article submission

letters (Swales, 1996), grant proposals (Connor, 2000; Connor & Upton, 2004), and editors’

responses to journal submissions (Flowerdew & Dudley-Evans, 2002). In the following sections

we briefly sketch something of what the research tells us about the key academic genres of

English-written articles, textbooks, and popularizations.

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 3.1 The research article

The research article is a cultural accomplishment developed from the activities of Henry

Oldenburgh in England and Denis de Sallo in France during the 17h century and emerged in

embryonic form, with the establishment of the Journal des Sçavans, Paris in January 1665 and

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London in March 1665.i

The genre of the scientific article developed from the informative letters that scientists

used to write to each other. The early scientific article sought to establish credibility more by

means of “the technology of virtual witnessing” (Shapin 1984, p. 491), i.e., more through the

reliable testimony of credible witnesses to secure the agreement of the scientific community than

by technical details, more by qualitative experience than by quantitative experiment and

observation in support of theory. Natural philosophers or “men of science”, as scientists were

then called in the 17th and 18th centuries (the word “scientist” was coined in 1833 only by

William Whewell at the request of the poet Coleridge) were tolerant of a wide range of

verificational means; they relied on the evidence of the five senses and the trust that existed

between gentlemen. The end of the 18th century saw the demise of this communal gentlemanly

witnessing, while the ethos of gentlemanly courtesy persisted down to the second half of the 19th

century (Shapin 1984).

But, as The Philosophical Transactions and subsequent journals began to assume a role

of providing a regular arena for discussion, the new and recurring rhetorical situation that

emerged led to the creation of a new genre increasingly distinct from its letter-writing origin.

Bacon and Boyle influenced the way science was communicated; they both contributed a lot to

the “making” of a rhetoric of science and to developing a convincing style for the research report

in order to reach consensus that can only be achieved through rhetorical persuasion (see Shapin

12
1984; Bazerman 1984; Valle, 1999 for detailed analyses of the research article configurational

development). Regarding the changes in style, presentation and argumentation the genre

underwent over the last four centuries, Gross et al. (2002) convincingly argue that these changes

should not be taken as progress or improvement, but as an evolving response to an evolving

discourse situation. More consistent, then, is an explanation of change in terms of plausible

selection pressures and adaptive mechanisms, increased cognitive complexity, higher standard of

proof and greater volume of data coupled with a dramatic increase in the number of scientific

articles, “a proliferation as startling as the overnight increase of bacteria in a petri dish” (Gross et

al. 2002: 29).

A great deal of research into academic writing has focused on this most prestigious genre

of scholarly writing: the research article. A substantial literature has shown that this is a

rhetorically sophisticated artefact which displays a careful balance of factual information and

social interaction. Indeed, academic writers do not only need to make the results of their research

public, but also persuasive, and their success in gaining acceptance for their work is at least

partly dependent on the strategic manipulation of various rhetorical and interactive features

(Myers, 1990; Swales, 2004).

One strand of research has sought to describe the conventional rhetorical structure of the

article, or various parts of it, through a move analysis, identifying distinct rhetorical units that

perform coherent communicative functions (Swales, 2004). This work was pioneered by Swales’

(1990) famous analysis of article introductions, the three-part CARS (Creating a Research

Space) model which has proved remarkably robust. Despite terminological variations, it seems to

be a prototypical structure in English-written article introductions in a range of disciplines (e.g.,

Samraj, 2002; Lewin et al., 2001) and various formal features been identified as signalling these

13
moves. Beyond this, descriptions have been given for the stages of Methods, Results (Brett,

1994) and Discussion sections (Dubois, 1997; Lewin et al., 2001). Unfortunately, some of these

descriptions offer an assortment of analytic schemes for what are essentially similar texts,

particularly when considering the Discussion section. While these differences are partly simply

nomenclatural, this section appears to offer writers an array of rhetorical options, and this

explains why Dubois (1997) abandoned the attempt to offer an overall scheme altogether.

While analysing schematic structures has proved an invaluable way of looking at texts,

these differences suggest the need to tie functions more closely to formal realisations. Crookes

(1986) raised the problem many years ago of validating analyses to ensure they are not simply

products of the analyst’s intuitions. Moves are, of course, always motivated outside the text as

writers respond to their social context, but analysts have not always been convincingly able to

identify the ways these shifts are explicitly signalled by lexico-grammatical patterning. In

addition to problems of intuition-driven descriptions, analysts are also increasingly aware of the

dangers of oversimplification by assuming blocks of texts to be mono-functional and ignoring

writers’ complex purposes and “private intentions” (Bhatia, 1999).

In addition to move analyses, research has increasingly examined clusters of register,

style, lexis and other rhetorical features which might distinguish articles and other genres.

One example of this work is Halliday’s (1998) continuing interest in grammatical

metaphor in physics writing. This explores how scientists reconstrue human experience by

presenting processes as things; packaging complex phenomena as a single element of clause

structure. Grammatical metaphor freezes an event, such as ‘atoms bond rapidly’, and repackages

it as an object, ‘Rapid atom bonding’. Adverbs become adjectives, processes become nouns, and

nouns become adjectival, creating a noun phrase. Turning processes into objects in this way

14
embodies scientific epistemologies that seek to show relationships between entities. Grammatical

metaphor is also central to physics because it allows writers to highlight processes in order to say

something about them and to manage the information flow of a text more effectively.

An important feature of much recent work has been a growing interest in the

interpersonal dimensions of academic writing. This research has sought to reveal how persuasion

in various genres is not only accomplished through the representation of ideas, but also by the

construction of an appropriate authorial self and the negotiation of accepted participant

relationships (Hyland, 2005a & b). Once again, academic articles have attracted considerable

attention in this regard, with recent work looking at, for example, imperatives (Hyland, 2002a;

Swales, Ahmad, Chang, Chavez, Dressen, & Seymour, 1998), personal pronouns (Hyland,

2001b; Kuo, 1999), hedging and boosting (Hyland, 1998a; Myers, 1989; Salager-Meyer, 1994),

theme (Gosden, 1993) and citation practices (Hyland, 2000a; Thompson, & Ye, 1991, Cronin

1995, 2005; Cronin et al., 2003, 2004).

Interaction in research writing essentially involves ‘positioning’, or adopting a point of

view in relation to both the issues discussed in the text and to others who hold points of view on

those issues. In claiming a right to be heard, and to have their work taken seriously, writers must

display a competence as disciplinary insiders. This competence is, at least in part, achieved

through a writer-reader dialogue which situates both their research and themselves, establishing

relationships between people, and between people and ideas. A number of different approaches

have been taken to interactions in texts including the evaluation model (Hunston & Thompson,

2000) and metadiscourseii (Hyland, 2004b, 2005a; Hyland & Tse, 2004), but both draw on the

ideas of stance and engagement (Hyland, 2001a & 2005b). Stance refers to the writer’s textual

‘voice’ or community recognised personality; the ways writers present themselves and convey

15
their judgements, opinions, and commitments. Engagement, on the other hand, refers to the ways

writers acknowledge and connect with their readers, pulling them along with their argument,

focusing their attention, acknowledging their uncertainties, including them as discourse

participants, and guiding them to interpretations.

The main ways these interactional functions are realised are summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Key resources of academic interaction (Hyland, 2005b: 177)

Interaction

Stance Engagement

Hedges Boosters Attitude Self Reader Directives Questions Knowledge Asides

Markers Mention Mention Reference

Together these resources have a dialogic purpose in that they refer to, anticipate, or otherwise

take up the actual or anticipated voices and positions of potential readers (Bakhtin, 1986).

3.2 Textbooks

University textbooks were, until recently, something of a neglected genre, tending to

have a peripheral status and frequently seen as commercial projects unrelated to research. There

is a widely held view of textbooks as repositories of codified knowledge and classroom lore

(Myers, 1992) which reflects Kuhn’s (1970) influential belief that, in the sciences at least,

textbooks are conservative exemplars of current disciplinary paradigms. They are seen as places

where we find the tamed and accepted theories of a discipline, where ‘normal science’ is defined

and acknowledged fact represented. Bakhtin (1986) refers to this as ‘undialogized’ discourse:

privileged in its absolute definition of reality. Thus while the research article is a highly valued

genre central to the disciplinary construction of new knowledge, the textbook represents an

16
attempt to reduce the mulitivocity of past texts to a single voice of authority. Connors represents

the dichotomy like this:

In most developed intellectual disciplines, the function of texts has always been

essentially conservative: textbooks, which change with glacial slowness, provide stability

amid the shifting winds of theoretical argument. They serve as sources for the proven

truths needed for students’ basic training while advanced scholarship extends the

theoretical envelope, usually in journal articles.

(Connors, 1986, p. 190)

Textbooks are indispensable to academic life, particularly for undergraduates. Not only

do they facilitate the professional’s role as a teacher, but they play a major role in the learners’

experience and understanding of a subject by providing a coherently ordered epistemological

map of the disciplinary landscape and its textual practices. Students entering university must

acquire the specialised literacy of their community and textbooks offer a model of literacy

practices, how the discipline discusses what it knows (Candlin & Hyland, 1999). The practices of

constructing a disciplinary image and mediating unfamiliar material, however, involve rhetorical

characteristics not always shared by other genres (e.g., Love, 2002; Myers, 1992; Swales, 1993).

It is thus unclear whether they can both convey scholarship to neophytes and develop the

“peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding and arguing that define

the discourse of the community” (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 4).

Textbooks are therefore something of a hybrid genre at the intersection of scientific and

pedagogic discourse (Bondi, 1999; Hyland, 2000a). Even where paradigms compete for

dominance they stand as representations of disciplinary orthodoxy while providing a medium for

17
writers to disseminate a vision of their discipline to both experts and novices, representing a

complex professional discourse that involves the writer in both pedagogic and professional

interactions (Swales, 1995; Hyland, 2000a). As a result, several studies of the textbook genre

have been concerned with the status of the knowledge they present, concentrating in particular

on such issues as hedging and authorial comment (e.g., Halliday & Martin, 1993; Hyland,

2000a), argument structure (Bondi, 1999; Love, 2002) and the interplay of different voices in the

text (Bondi, 1999; Freddi, 2005).

Writers have sought to bring together some of these features by exploring the role of

metadiscourse in university textbooks (Hyland, 2000a, 2005b). Metadiscourse concerns the

writers reference to the writer, the reader or the text. It is a key dimension of genre analysis as it

can help show how language choices reflect the different purposes of writers, the different

assumptions they make about their audiences, and the different kinds of interactions they create

with their readers (Crismore et al., 1993; Hyland, 2005a; Hyland & Tse, 2004). Metadiscourse

actually refers to a diverse array of interactive and interactional (Thompson, 2001) resources

used to manage textual interactions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find that interactive features,

such as frame markers (first, in conclusion, we will now), transitions (therefore, and on the other

hand) and endophoric markers (see table, as noted above), which are largely used to manage the

information flow and assist comprehension, are more frequent in textbooks. Interactional

resources like hedges (possible, perhaps, may), boosters (show, definitely, demonstrate) and self

mention (exclusive we, I) which focus on the participants of the interaction and are typically used

to assist persuasion, are more frequent in articles (Hyland, 2000a, 2005a).

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 3.3 Science popularizations

The number of journals carrying reports of scientific findings for a lay audience has

dramatically increased in recent years, interesting analysts by their different use of language for

different purposes and audiences. We should emphasize here that popular science belongs to

Fleck’s (Cohen & Schnelle, 1986) exoteric circle and should be distinguished from publications

with a professional non-specialist audience of scientists interested in developments outside their

disciplines, essentially an esoteric audience with different epistemological and communicative

needs. Unlike research articles, which seek to negotiate claims for new knowledge with

reviewers, editors and peers, and textbooks, which offer a model of the discipline for students,

pieces written for the general public attempt to link issues in the specialist domain to those of

everyday life. For some, this represents a distortion, a dumbing down of science to suggest easy

comprehension and an ideology of progress, while others regard the jargon and technicalities of

science papers as exclusive and elitist.

Myers (1990) argues that a key difference between articles and popularisations is that they

provide contrasting views of science, with popularizations tending to focus on the objects of

study and articles on the disciplinary procedures by which they are studied. The professional

papers construct what he calls a “narrative of science” by following the argument of the scientist,

arranging time into a parallel series of events, and emphasizing the conceptual structure of the

discipline in their syntax and vocabulary. The discourse thus embodies assumptions of

impersonality, cumulative knowledge construction, and empiricism. The popular articles, on the

other hand, present a “narrative of nature”, focusing on the material, plant or animal, itself rather

than the scientific activity of studying them. Presentation in popularisations is therefore often

chronological, and the syntax and vocabulary paint a picture of nature which is external to

19
scientific practices. Here the scientist acts alone and simply observes nature. These different

language choices not only convey different meanings of both research and science, but mean that

writers or readers of one narrative cannot easily understand the other.

Such generic language differences have been explored by a number of writers. Crismore

and Farnsworth (1990), for example, have shown that science authors tend to remove hedges

when they write for a lay readership as they seek to offer a sense of the uniqueness and

originality of observations, confer greater certainty on claims and stress the factual status of

results. Hyland (2005b) discovered considerable variation in evidential claims and the ways that

popularizations drew on external justification for statements. In research articles, attributions to

other sources largely function to recognise earlier work and embed new work in a community

generated literature to demonstrate its relevance and importance (Hyland, 2000a).

Popularizations, on the other hand, only identify particular scientists who are relevant to the

current development and bestow credibility through their position in an institution.

Popularizations also differ from articles in the ways in which such material is imported into the

text. They appear to be more like popular journalism in their use of direct interview quotes and

extensive use of the reporting verb say, whereas in articles material is overwhelmingly presented

as a summary from a single source or as a generalisation combining several studies.

There are, then, distinctive differences in the genres of the academy which are repeated for

other texts as writers set out their ideas for different purposes and audiences. In this science

popularization genre, information is presented as newsworthy and language choices work to

invest it with factual status, relate it to real life concerns, and present it as relevant to readers

with perhaps little interest in the ways that findings were arrived at or in the controversies

20
surrounding them. Such differences between genres are, as we elaborate in the following

sections, also key features of academic writing in different disciplines and in different languages.

4 Disciplinary variation

While the concept of genre has been extremely productive in exploring situated language

use over the past 20 years, its influence has perhaps led to an over-emphasis on the resemblances

between texts rather than the differences within them. This is largely because genre harnesses the

power of generalization: grouping together texts that have important similarities in terms of

rhetorical purpose, form and audience, and then exploring how they differ from other text types.

Consequently there has been a relative neglect of the ways the same genres vary across

communities. With the idea of discourse community we arrive at a more rounded and socially

informed theory of texts and contexts. The concept draws attention to the idea that we do not

generally use language to communicate with the world at large, but with individuals and with

other members of our social groups. In studies of academic discourse, then, ‘community’

provides a principled way of understanding how meaning is produced in interaction and has

proved useful in identifying disciplinary specific rhetorical practices.

4.1 Community and discipline

The notion of discipline is a nebulous and shifting one, notoriously difficult to define and

seen variously as institutional conveniences, networks of communication, domains of values and

modes of enquiry, while post-modernists have looked at the fragmentation of academic life and

rejected the term altogether (e.g., Gilbert, 1995). The idea of academic community, or discipline,

however, is central to our understanding of science and science writing. From the ‘invisible

colleges’ of the seventeenth century to the research groups of modern times, it has provided a

21
way of understanding the social practices of academics acting as group members. In applied

linguistics a great deal of research has confirmed the distinctiveness of discourses cohering

around the concept of community, and researchers have become more sensitive to the ways

genres are written, used and responded to by individuals acting as members of social groups.

The concept of community provides a means of analysing communication as a joint,

socially situated accomplishment. The idea draws together a number of key aspects of context

that are crucial to the production and interpretation of discourse: knowledge of a cultural and

interpersonal situation, knowledge of interlocutors, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of

texts and conventions for saying things (e.g., Swales, 1990, 1998). Emphasis therefore tends to

be on what is ‘shared’ by a community (e.g., Johns, 1997) including shared patterns of

interaction and the “rhetorical conventions and stylistic practices that are tacit and routine for the

members” (Doheny-Farina, 1992, p. 296). While critics see the concept as too structuralist,

static, and deterministic (e.g., Canagarajah, 2002a; Prior, 1998), current conceptions of

community in terms of an individual’s engagement in certain discourses and practices, rather

than orientations to rules and goals, provides a more rounded and socially informed theory of

texts and contexts (Hyland, 2000a, 2006).

When applied to academic domains, the expression of community in the notion of

discipline offers researchers a framework for conceptualizing the expectations, conventions and

practices which influence academic communication. Disciplinary communities have been

described as tribes (Becher, 1989), each with its own norms, categorizations, bodies of

knowledge, sets of conventions, and modes of inquiry which comprise a recognizable culture

(Bartholomae, 1986; Hyland, 2000a). The important point is that it is individuals acting as

community members who use language to engage in these practices or achieve these goals. This

22
community-based orientation to literacy therefore focuses on the importance of communicating,

and learning to communicate, as an insider of the community one wishes to engage with. Textual

features reveal writers’ assumptions about their readers, shaped by prior texts, repeated

experience, participation in various groups and orientations to certain conventions (Tse &

Hyland, 2006).

4.2 Situating arguments in disciplinary conventions

Research into how writing functions in different disciplines was pioneered by Bazerman (1988)

and MacDonald (1994) who showed how knowledge creation is related to key epistemological

and cultural differences through the ways that writers in different fields draw on disciplinary

literature, code knowledge in accepted modes of argument and represent themselves in their

texts. MacDonald, for example, suggested that psychology articles are more likely to foreground

research methods and warrants and are more abstract, while literature articles are more

particularistic and focus least on research methods and warrants.

There also appears to be considerable differences in how writers situate their work to

mark their participation in their communities. In science and engineering abstracts, for instance,

writers frequently offer their research as a valuable contribution to pressing real-world issues,

indicating an applied dimension and the diffusion of information from the public into the

scientific sphere. Constant progress is a central part of the scientific cultures and writers often

stress novelty, while engineers emphasize the utility of their research, mainly to the industrial

world which relies on it. This explains why software and computer engineering article

introductions do not strictly follow the CARS model we referred to in section 3.1. above

(Anthony 1999; Posteguillo 1999). Writers in marketing, applied linguistics and sociology, in

23
contrast, tend to establish an unresolved disciplinary relevant problem (Hyland, 2000a; Samraj

2002). We also find variations in textbooks. In hard knowledge fields the discipline appears to

embody its truths and current platforms of professional activity. In the sciences (e.g., Myers,

1992) and economics (Tadros, 1994), certitude, abstract nominalizations (recasting actions as

things), thematic structure, and style, thus seem to reinforce existing paradigms. In philosophy

and composition, in contrast, textbooks are often regarded as important vehicles for advancing

scholarship and presenting original research (e.g., Gebhardt, 1993).

One of the most obvious strategies for situating research within disciplinary expectations

is through citation (Hyland, 2000a; Thompson & Ye, 1991, Cronin et al., 2003, 2004). By

acknowledging previous research, writers are able to display an allegiance to a particular

orientation, create a rhetorical gap for their research, and establish a credible writer ethos

(Swales, 1990). The frequency and use of citations, however, exhibit disciplinary differences.

The fact that scientific knowledge tends to be highly specialised means that scientists participate

in relatively discrete areas and can presuppose a certain amount of background knowledge and

expertise (Hyland, 2000a). Citation therefore integrates new claims into a frame of already

accredited facts. References are often sparse and bound to a particular topic which helps to

closely define a specific context and contribute to a sense of linear progression. In the social

sciences, however, the literature is open to greater interpretation and criteria for establishing

claims are less clear-cut. Because readers cannot be assumed to possess the same interpretive

knowledge, writers have to elaborate a context through far greater use of citation (Hyland,

2000a). This specialisation of research also means that self-citation is also a particularly

prominent feature of writing in the hard sciences (Lawani, 1982; Rousseau, 1999; Tagliacozzo,

24
1977), where it comprises over 12% of all references (Salager-Meyer, 1998a), compared with

only 4% in the soft fields (Hyland, 2001b).

A further aspect of disciplinary variation concerns the use of key genres and their

structures. Coffin et al. (2003), for instance, identify three different genres as being pivotal to

each of three main domains of knowledge: project proposals in the sciences, essays in the

humanities, and reports and case studies in the social sciences. But even when we identify a

common genre across disciplines, we find a range of different structural patterns. Braine (1995),

for instance, found that no two branches of engineering had experimental report formats that

employed the same move structures. Such variations have also been found in the emphasis given

to particular moves in article abstracts (Hyland, 2000a; Samraj, 2002) and articles themselves.

Such differences also occur in student writing genres. Hyland (2004a), for instance, in a

study of the acknowledgements in 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations, found that writers in the

soft fields were far more likely to offer a reflection on their experience of research and to accept

responsibility for the work, while writers in the sciences and engineering fields more often

thanked individuals and institutions for funding and technical support. At the other end of the

dissertation, Bunton (2005) shows that the generic structure of the conclusion chapter of Ph.D.

theses in science and technology tend to be longer and have more sections than those in the

humanities and social sciences. The science and technology conclusions also concentrated on

broader results and claims, gave greater emphasis to future research and referred to practical

applications which the writers see being put to immediate use in their field.

25
 4.3 Authorial stance and reader engagement

We noted above that writers must project a shared disciplinary context by expressing a

stance which balances claims for the significance, originality and plausibility of their work

against the convictions and expectations of their readers (Hyland, 2005b). Comparisons show

that writers in different disciplines representing themselves and their work in different ways,

with those in the humanities and social sciences taking far more explicitly involved and personal

positions than those in the science and engineering fields (Bondi, 2005; Hyland, 2005b). In a

series of studies, Hyland addressed disciplinary variation in the use of hedges and boosters

(Hyland, 1998a; 2001a; Hyland & Tse, 2004), attitude markers (Hyland, 2000a) and self-mention

(Hyland, 2001b) in research papers, and found that the more discursive ‘soft’ fields of

philosophy, sociology, applied linguistics and marketing contained 75% more stance items than

the engineering and science papers.

Figure 4 summarises these findings.

Feature Phil Soc AL Mk Phy Bio ME EE Total

Stance 42.8 31.1 37.2 39.5 25.0 23.8 19.8 21.6 30.9
Hedges 18.5 14.7 18.0 20.0 9.6 13.6 8.2 9.6 14.5
Attitude Mkrs 8.9 7.0 8.6 6.9 3.9 2.9 5.6 5.5 6.4
Boosters 9.7 5.1 6.2 7.1 6.0 3.9 5.0 3.2 5.8
Self Mention 5.7 4.3 4.4 5.5 5.5 3.4 1.0 3.3 4.2
Fig 4: Stance features (per1,000 words) in 240 research articles

Other studies have confirmed these disciplinary variations in stance features. There seems,

for example, to be far heavier use of self-mention in computer science and electronic engineering

articles than in physics (Kuo, 1999) and different patterns of author representation in history

compared with economics articles (Bondi, 2005). Research has also noted differences in other

26
academic genres. Motta-Roth (1998) discovered that book reviews in economics are more

evaluative than those in linguistics or chemistry, perhaps because of the greater competitiveness

among alternative theories in that field, and Parry (1998) observes that criticisms are more overt

in humanities than science theses, ranging from caustic in philosophy to considerate in history.

Busa (2005) notes the syntactic foregrounding of discourse producers (the economist, the author,

we) in economics abstracts compared to those from physiology which thematize discourse

objects (study, research) and reference to human subjects are replaced by objectivized discourse

entities (subjects, patients, groups) making psychology appear to be a very impersonal

discipline. Support for this kind of impersonality in the sciences was also observed in the higher

frequencies of evaluative that structures, such as we believe that and it is possible that, in the

social sciences in both articles and theses abstracts (Hyland & Tse, 2005) and in articles and

book reviews (Groom, 2005).

We also, however, find similar disciplinary differences in engagement features (Hyland,

2001a; 2002a; 2005a; Hyland & Tse, 2004), with considerable variations in the use of reader

pronouns, questions and directives across disciplines in RAs. Over 80% of these occur in the soft

discipline papers, particularly in philosophy, where they appeal to scholarly solidarity,

presupposing a set of discipline-identifying understandings linking the writer and reader. (Fig 6).

Overall, these stance patterns coincide with our intuitions that the sciences tend to produce

more impersonal, or at least less reader inclusive, texts. More precisely however, they indicate

how the resources of language mediate the contexts in which they are used.

27
Feature Phil Soc AL Mk Phy Bio ME EE Total

Total 16.3 5.1 5.0 3.2 4.9 1.6 2.8 4.3 5.9
Reader ref 11.0 2.3 1.9 1.1 2.1 0.1 0.5 1.0 2.9
Directives 2.6 1.6 2.0 1.3 2.1 1.3 2.0 2.9 1.9
Questions 1.4 0.7 0.5 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.5
Shared know. 1.0 0.4 0.6 0.4 0.5 0.1 0.3 0.4 0.5
Asides 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1
Fig 6: Engagement features by discipline (per1,000 words)

The above considerations exclusively dealt with Anglo-American scientific writing. We

will now discuss the main findings of cross-linguistic research into scientific writing.

5 Cross linguistic variation

As we have noted, rhetorical analyses consider texts as social constructs and show how

language reflects its institutional context and organizes human knowledge. Contrastive

rhetoricians, as their name indicates, focus on the comparison of academic discourses written in

English vs. comparable discourses written in other languages (Grabe & Kaplan 1996; Connor

1996, 2002). These comparative studies have mainly been concerned with issues such as the

structuring of the research article (e.g., Sa'Adeddin 1989, Evangelisti-Allori 1998), the concept

of coherence (e.g., Hinds, 1987, 1990), the use of hedges and modal expressions (e.g., Hyland

1998a, 1998b; Salager-Meyer, 1994, 1998b, 2000), the use of reporting verbs (e.g., Thompson

and Ye 1991), the frequency of connectors and metadiscourse markers (e.g., Ventola &

Mauranen 1991; Mauranen 1993), and the expression of criticism (Salager-Meyer et al., 2003).

The majority of this research compares English with Asian (mostly Chinese and

Japanese) and Arabic languages, although a few deal with the contrasting of English with other

28
Western European languages, e.g., Finnish, Spanish, Italian, and French, and more recently, with

patterns characteristic of Russian and Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovene,

Hungarian, Ukranian). Below, we will focus on three of the features mentioned in earlier

sections of this chapter that are particularly relevant to cross-linguistic/cultural studies of

scientific writing: 1) the structuring of the introduction of research papers (more specifically the

CARS model mentioned earlier); 2) the phenomenon of hedges; and 3) the use of metadiscourse.

5.1 The CARS model

Swales’ CARS model (1990) has undoubtedly been the most influential model in the

textual analysis of the research article. It captures the ways in which academic writers justify and

highlight their own contribution to the on-going research of the field by establishing a topic for

the research and summarizing the key features of previous work, thus creating a gap in that work

that will form the basis of the writer’s claims. It is based on an ecological metaphor of

populations of researchers competing for resources and visibility in tightly contested areas, not

unlike populations of plants competing for light and nutrients. In other words, the CARS model

assumes antagonism and competition for research space among individual members or research

groups within an academic discourse community (Fredrickson & Swales, 1994). But, as Swales

(2004) observes, this metaphor has produced two conflicting effects: contributing to both the

model’s “interestingness” and its fallibility.

These effects derive from the fact that the CARS model privileges an environment in

which originality is highly prized, competition fierce and academic promotionalism strong

(Lindeberg 1998; Hyland 2000b). In other words, as Swales (2004) observes, the model

primarily reflects research in hard fields with big journals, big names and big libraries within

29
large discourse communities. Incidentally, the same could be said of the sociological and

anthropological accounts provided by such influential monographs as those of Latour and

Woolgar (1979) and Knorr-Cetina (1981) that are based on “big science,” the North American

scholarly communication system with its high-speed, high bandwidth networks, and competition

for influence, power, resources and prestigeiii. But promotionalism may not have such a high

priority in all academic cultures .

On the Eastern European academic scene, for example, the cultural, historical and

political proximity of languages has led to very different patterns of organisation. Duszak (1994)

and Golebiowski (1998, 1999), for instance observe that Polish writers tend to understate and

marginalize the “occupying a niche” move which is so frequent in English-written research paper

introductions. Yakhontova (2002b) similarly found no research gap in Russian- and Ukranian-

written papers and noted the absence of self-advertisement in conference abstracts in those

languages compared with the strong “promotional flavor” in English-written ones. As we have

seen, the influence of a market society with its great demands on competitiveness, attention

winning and recognition of target addressees to promote a research product inevitably influences

academic discourse, making it persuasive and self-promotional.

The absence of an explicit research gap has also been observed in research papers in

(Latin American) Spanish (López, 1982) Arabic (Najjar 1990), Malaysian (Ahmad 1997) and

Swedish (Fredrickson & Swales 1994). Fredrickson and Swales furthermore remark that the

Swedish-written papers they examined had a story-like feature, carefully positioned at the

beginning of the article as an attention getting device as if writers were competing for readership,

not for a space on the academic stage.

30
 Recent discussions reveal the complexities of comparing English with Chinese. Taylor

and Chen’s research (1991), for example, shows the methodological problems in contrastive

studies that result from the complex interactions both regional and disciplinary variations.

Examining the CARS model in a variety of science and engineering papers written in English by

Chinese writers, in English by English-speaking writers and in English by Chinese writers, they

found consistent patterns of difference across disciplines and first language speakers. The

Chinese scholars (when writing in English and even more so when writing in Chinese) were less

likely to elaborate the moves, wrote less and tended to omit or truncate discussion of previous

research. In fact, the Chinese academics refrained from directly citing writers whose work was

seen as deficient or incomplete. Taylor and Chen offer two speculative explanations for their

findings: 1) that Chinese scientists do not have access to a wide literature, and 2) a culturally-

oriented reason which emphasises the fact that disputation was absent in the Chinese scientific

tradition for a long time and that for Chinese scholars the maintenance of relationship takes

precedence over content in their academic writing (Scollon 1997).

Harrison (2002) offers similar conclusions about the lack of a knowledge gap in the

introductions of Japanese scientific texts. He argues that Japanese people tend to avoid

confrontation, make great assumptions about shared background knowledge and place a high

value on allusion to events and situations. It has been noted that such a concept of scientific

writing causes problems when Japanese scholars fail to realize that more detailed information is

necessary for understanding by people from other countries.

Swales (2004) remarks that the frequent absence of a literature gap in papers written in

languages other than English could thus reflect a kinder, more gentle and relaxed academic

world in which there is less competition for research space. In this alternative world, there may

31
be instead competition for readership, and the need of justifying doing any research at all may

have higher priority than establishing some small gap in an extensive previous literature. As we

will return to later, writer-audience considerations are also an important factor that have to be

taken into consideration when analyzing and interpreting the rhetoric of scientific writing.

5.2 Hedging

Scientific writers need to make decisions about the level of their knowledge claims

because the higher the level of claim, the more likely it will contradict existing positions and

challenge the assumptions underlying on-going research in the area. “Claim-making is a risky

practice”, as Hyland (2000a, p. 93) expresses it. It is by resorting to hedges that researchers

modify the epistemic warrant of their claims. These devices allow the writer to reduce his or her

commitment to the propositional content of the utterance or to open a discursive space where

readers can dispute the writer’s interpretations.

Hedges are among the main pragmatic features which shape the research article as the

principle vehicle for new knowledge and which distinguish it from other forms of academic

discourse (Hyland 1998a). They allow researchers to produce a closer fit between their

statements about new discoveries and the pre-existing understandings of the scientific

community. They are therefore interactive devices in that they build a relationship between the

writer and the community of readers and allow writers to anticipate their audience reactions by

reducing the certainty with which they present their claims. A “modesty” strategy in science

writing which dates back to Robert Boyle.

Because hedges can express politeness, indirectness, understatement, mitigation,

commitment and/or vagueness, hedges are pragmatically polyfunctional (Clemen 1997) and have

32
been the focus of extensive research in all kinds of discourses, scientific discourse obviously

being one of them.

An abundant literature has demonstrated the clear importance of this socio-pragmatic

phenomenon in Anglo-American academic writing since Lakoff first discussed it in 1972, but no

real consensus has been reached. This lack of consensus was exemplified in the late 1990s by the

radically opposed stances adopted by Crompton (1997), who fervently defended a positivist view

on the subject, and Salager-Meyer (1994, 1998b, 2000) who strongly supported a mentalistic

approach and defined hedges as first and foremost the product of a mental attitude. Nonetheless,

it is important to note that hedges are no longer approached from a semantic perspective but

rather from a socio-pragmatic one.

Linguists and applied linguists have also studied hedging in written scientific discourse in

a number of other languages. Régent (1994), Crosnier (1996) and Liddicoat (2005), among

others, have analyzed the issue in French-written research papers and all reached the conclusion

that French scientists are much more prescriptive, authoritarian and categorical than their

English-speaking colleagues. Instead they use bemol statements (Régent 1994: 58) when stating

their claims and rejecting others’ opinions, thus avoiding the so-called Face-Threatening Act

(Brown and Levinson 1987). Martin agrees that it is in the use of such “précautions oratoires"

(Martin 1996, p. 22) that we find the most prominent cultural difference between English and

French academic writing. This led Beaufrère-Bertheux to refer to the hyper-modesty of Anglo-

American scientists (Beaufrère-Bertheux 1997, p. 232), and Sionis to the “exaggerated self-

confidence of French academics” who therefore sound arrogant to their Anglo-American

counterparts (1997, p. 211).

33
 Fewer hedging devices has also been noted in Finnish academic writing (Ventola, 1997)

and in articles written in Bulgarian and in English by Bulgarian-speaking scientists (Vassileva,

1997, 2001), indicating that Finnish and Bulgarian academic writing show a higher degree of

commitment and a lower degree of deference toward the discourse community than its English

counterpart. Articles written in Spanish and in English by Spanish-speaking scientists were also

found to be less modalized than those written in English by native-English-speaking scientists

(Oliver del Olmo 2004; Mendiluce Cabrera & Hernández Bartolomé, 2005) as were RA written

in Dutch by Dutch authors (Burrough-Boenisch, 2004). In contrast, articles written in German

and English by German authors (e.g., Clyne 1991; Kreutz & Harres, 1997), in Polish (Duszak

1994) by Polish writers and in Czech by Czech writers (Cmerjoková & Danes 1997) show a

higher degree of tentativeness than those written by English-speaking writers.

Research into hedging in East Asian languages is more contentious. Although Hinkel

(1997) claims that hedging is common in the Confucian rhetorical tradition, her study is

inconclusive. Hyland and Milton’s (1997) analysis of hedging in the Hong Kong University of

Science and Technology’s learners’ corpus showed that essays written by more proficient

learners approached those written by native English writers in their use of hedges, thus

suggesting that learner’ s proficiency level plays a role in the use of hedges. Hinkel’s different

findings may result from the essay prompts she used, highlighting the importance of research

design.

These differences indicate that the convention of hedging in academic writing is culture-

specific. Emphasis, however, should be given to the point made in section 4 above, that

discipline and genre play an important role in the frequency of use of hedging. Research papers

in the humanities and social sciences contain more probability expressions than those in the

34
natural sciences. Diachronic studies of hedging have also shown that the difference in the use of

modalization between 19th and 20th century scientific writing lies not so much in the frequency

of hedging devices but on the type of devices used (Salager-Meyer & Defives, 1998; Gross et al.,

2002). Other variables could also exert an influence on the use of modalization in academic

writing, such as the writer’s status, age and sex, but these variables have rarely, if ever, been

taken into consideration, perhaps because of the difficulty of analyzing them.

5.3 Metadiscourse and the concept of reader/writer responsible languages

Contrastive rhetoric analyses of scientific discourse have also called attention to the

existence of differences in explicitness between languages. English is said to lie at the higher end

of a scale of explicitness of text organisation: English readers expect signposts of coherence and

unity as they read, and writers need to provide these transitions (Crismore & Farnsworth 1990;

Hyland 1999a, 1999b, 2004b; Hyland & Tse 2004a, 2004b). English-written texts, which tends

to contain a great deal of metadiscourse, thus reflect a more reader-oriented attitude. Other

languages, though, are much less writer-responsibleiv.

Academic writing in Japanese (Hinds 1987), Korean (Eggington 1987), and Chinese

(Jensen 1998) is said to be characterized by non-linearity, with less use of explicit transitions and

illocution markers. Readers are expected to piece together the thread of the writer’s logic which

binds the composition together so as to make a coherent text. According to Hinds (1984, 1987,

1990), writing that is too explicit is not valued in many East Asian languages where the task of

the writer is not necessarily to convince but rather to stimulate readers to think for themselves

and draw their own conclusions from the argument. While Hinds work has been extremely

influential, some critics have pointed out that his generalizations about Japanese expository prose

35
are based on analyses of articles from only one newspaper and that different genres may require

different styles. Hinds’ point is that there is a difference in the perceived coherence of Japanese

and Anglo-American texts, however, remains an important and interesting issue.

Texts written in Spanish (Valero Garcés, 1996) and Portuguese (Oliveira, 1997) also

lack many of the explicit signals of cohesion we expect in English written texts. Far fewer links,

previews and reviews has also been noted in French-written scientific papers (Osborne 1994;

Bachschmidt, 1999) as well as in Slovene (Pisanski-Peterlin, 2005) and German academic

writing (Clyne, 1991). German academic texts are often dismissed as pretentious, digressive,

propositionally asymmetrical, longwinded and badly organized by English readers due to their

non-adherence to English discourse structures and rhetorical norms. This led Michael Clyne to

characterize German academic discourse as “cooked spaghetti” (Clyne 1987, pp. 237-238;

Skudlik 1990), due to its sharp contrast with more linear Anglo-American writing. Clyne goes on

to argue that while saying a text is easy to follow may be interpreted as a compliment in an

Anglo-Saxon context, it is less so among German academics whose texts conform to the primary

function of Wissensdarstellung. Similarly, Ventola and Mauranen (1991) and Mauranen (1993)

remark that Finnish scientists use less metalanguage for organizing texts, show a more negative

kind of politeness and a greater tendency towards implicitness than Anglo-American writers do.

Some might consider Finnish prose aloof and uncaring toward the reader, but Mauranen claims

that the Finnish style can be interpreted as polite and not-patronizing to the reader as what is

obvious is left unsaid.

Scientific prose in Slavic languages also tends to be more concerned with presenting

knowledge than addressing the reader (Cmejrková & Danes 1997; Golebiowski 1998;

Yakhontova, 2001), or, as Yakhontova (2002a) aptly puts is in her study of conference abstracts

36
written in Russian and Ukranian academics, Slavic academic writing tends to “tell” rather than

“sell.” This does not imply a lack of writer-reader cooperation but means that the reader is

expected to invest more effort in following the writer’s presentation.

5.4 Limitations of Contrastive rhetorical studies

Contrastive Rhetoric studies into scientific writing have been criticized on a variety of

grounds, the most frequently voiced referring to design flaws such as small sample size (Connor

1996), comparing mixed genres in different contexts (Swales 1990), and a lack of a tertium

comparationis (Connor 1996, p. 164). Moreover, as Swales (2004) argues, it is increasingly

difficult in today’s research world to construct a corpus of non-English texts that can be

considered equivalent to English ones (especially in the “bigger” fields) in terms of status, likely

audience reached, and level of reviewing and editorial gatekeeping.

Genres too have to be taken into account, because while many research genres seem to be

universal, there may still be differences between Anglo-American genres and those in other

languages (Grabe & Kaplan 1996; Yakhontova 2002b). A choice of language may indeed bring a

change of genre (Melander, 1998, p. 217). Another criticism of this research is that it often tends

to characterize groups as static and homogeneous (Spack, 1997).

Recent critics have also blamed contrastive rhetoricians for teaching students/scientists to

write for native English speakers’ expectations instead of expressing their own lingual and

cultural identities (Kubota 1999, Ramanathan, & Atkinson, 1999). We should perhaps

distinguish here, however, between the author as a social individual with a native language and

an investment in a text, and the author as a social construct, observing a set of rhetorical

practices and where a social identity is less relevant. Connor et al. (1995) also rightly point out, if

37
Finnish scientists wish to get EU research grants, they need to follow EU norms, and these tend

to be based on Anglo-American scientific discourse.

We will now examine the various cultural, socio-political, historical and educational

factors that have been suggested to account for the cross-linguistic rhetorical differences

observed in scientific writing.

6 Academic cultures, intellectual traditions and socio-political considerations

Traditionally, the discrepancies in writing styles and patterns of textual organization

revealed in contrasted texts are labelled “cultural” or “cultural specific differences”. This

umbrella term, in fact, embraces rather diverse interpretations stemming from a wide range or

possible influences, varying from purely intralinguistic peculiarities to socio-political factors

which interplay and leave their joint imprints upon the texts created within different linguistic

and cultural environments. Several interpretational perspectives then account for the extremely

complicated and intricate relationship between writing and culture. We shall here present and

compare the various standpoints from which researchers, in the last decade or so, have sought to

explain the differences observed in the writing styles of different academic cultures, starting

from the earliest (the influence of thought patterns) to the most recent, which calls socio-political

factors into play.

6.1 Thought patterns

The thought patterns explanation is related to Sapir Whorf’s linguistic relativity

hypothesis that proposes a close connection between one’s language and one’s worldview. It was

initiated by Kaplan through his germinal and provocative 'doodles study' of 1966 on the

38
organization of paragraphs in different languages, the results of which, so its author claimed,

show that English follows a linear modelv, while writers from Semitic, Oriental, Russian or

Romance language background apply a more digressive or circular model. Although Kaplan’s

study was criticized later for its ethnocentrism, his work is today considered as the starting point

of Contrastive Rhetoric research. It suggested that, on the one hand, rhetorical patterns are as

much a component of language as lexical, syntactical and semantic phenomena, and, on the

other, that a broadening of discourse analysis is required to provide wider cross-linguistic and

cross-cultural comparative evidence in the area of textual studies.

Folman and Sarig (1990) disagreed with the influence of thought patterns on writing style

and rather claimed that cross-linguistic rhetorical differences lie within the realm of the

professed and implanted syllabi of language arts. This argument does not seem a valid one,

however, because syllabi are a cultural product, i.e., a reflection of a nation’s particular thought

patterns.

6.2 Influence of national intellectual style

Rather than referring to nations, Galtung (1979, 1985) refers to thought styles to explain

different academic and intellectual traditions, hence different conceptions of academic writing.

Galtung compared Teutonic intellectual style with ‘Saxonic’, ‘Nipponic’ and ‘Gallic styles’ and

found that Saxonic style emphasizes data analysis, description and deductive thinking, and

facilitates dialogue and interactiveness. By contrast, scholars influenced by Teutonic intellectual

styles discourage dialogue by participating in a cryptic monologism which emphasises

39
theoretical issues, inductive thinking, and gives greater significance to the propositional content

than to form; in short, a style which institutionalizes digressiveness or “baroqueness,

associativeness and multiplicity of standpoints” (Cmerjková, 1996, p. 13). Clyne (1991, p. 65)

posits that knowledge—a stimulus for thought—is idealized in the German tradition where the

onus is on the reader to make the effort to understand texts. Studies conducted by Clyne (1983,

1987, 1991), Mauranen (1993) and Golebiowski (1998) on the issues of linearity, hierarchy,

symmetry and digressiveness in English, German, Finnish and Polish academic texts compared

with those written in English by German, Finnish and Polish scholars suggested that scientific

communication styles and discoursal organization are related to cultural value systems. Such

generalisations, however, risk interpreting data through cultural stereotypes.

6.3 Influence of the educational system and writing instruction

National intellectual traditions shape the norms and conventions of writing, and these

norms are transmitted and sustained by educational systems. As Mauranen (1992, p. 239) argues:

“There is ample evidence that all writing is strongly anchored in the values of the writing

cultures that people get socialized into as they learn to write.” Writing is then an expression of

culturevi, and native culture (in particular the educational system of the writer’s culture)

influences writing habits. This view is shared by many researchers (Clyne 1991; Le, 1999;

Vassileva, 2000; Martin, 1996; Mauranen, 1993; Swales, 1990;) who treat genres as a kind of

social activity realized in language, existing within social, cultural and linguistic parameters.

Duszak (1994) argues that styles of intellectual debating, scientific prose, and attitudes to

knowledge and academia are interconnected with cultural values, norms and beliefs. In other

40
words, the generic constraints on academic prose reflect the cultural habits of the writer’s

academic community.

It is therefore assumed that national educational styles are congruent with a general

cultural value orientation and the dominant verbal style associated with it, and that this

influences the “clash” (Peck MacDonald, 1990, p. 55) observed between Anglo-American and

“continental” writing. In the North American educational system writing instruction is given

considerable emphasis, as is evidenced in widespread college composition courses which place

great emphasis on the argumentative/persuasive essay, the existence of writing centers at

universities and the numerous writing journals and textbooks (see Connor [1996], Braine [2001],

and Russell [1992] for an historical overview of this tradition). By contrast, no such tradition of

writing instruction exists elsewhere in the world (Anderson & Gunnarsson, 1995; Petric, 2005;

Salager-Meyer et al., 2003, Mauranen, 1993; Yakhontova, 1997, 2001; Canagarajah, 2002b)

where the concept of teaching academic or discipline-specific writing is not known (there is thus

a lack of textbooks or manuals on writing in the L1), although the state of affairs in this respect is

slowly changing (Petric, 2005; Salager-Meyer et al., 2003).

6.4 Influence of other languages and learning traditions

Vassileva (2001, p. 100) remarks that the “essay-like” composition style of Bulgarian academic

texts is due to the long-standing impact of French and German, Russian itself being influenced

by French. Along the same lines, Yakhontova (2001) emphasizes that the Ukranian system of

higher education still employs the highly theoretical stance characteristic of European (German

and French) intellectualism. The emerging body of work investigating discourse-level contrasts

41
between writing in English and in Czech, Russian, Ukranian, Polish, and Slovene can be

explained by several factors:

1) similarities in syntactic structures of Slavic languages

2) the common intellectual tradition formed under the German historical influence on the

education and academic discourse in the region, more recently transmitted via the

Russian intellectual tradition. German academic writing served as a model for Slovene

academic culture until the end of World War II (Pisanski & Peterlin, 2005), although its

influence is still present in some disciplines, especially in the humanities and the soft

sciences. The cultural ties between the Slovene people and the German-speaking world

remained strong even after the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and German was

still one of the most important foreign languages, thus also the language of professional

and scientific training well after World War II.

3) Ukranian scholarship was formed during the Soviet era (and dominated by it for over 70

years) when the communist ideology was considered to be the only methodological

foundation of research. This ideology has obviously left its imprints on Soviet and post-

Soviet academic rhetoric.

The influence of other languages and learning traditions has also been noted in the case

of Finnish (Mauranen, 1993) and Swedish (Lindeberg, 1988) academic writing, two countries

whose academic learning traditions have been greatly influenced by German academic traditions.

This thus confirms Galtung’s (1979, 1985) theory which places Eastern Europe in the sphere of

historical influence of the Teutonic intellectual style.

Such external ideological influence is obviously not static but dynamic because it is

socially-coded and transmitted, and it changes as the society whose values it articulates changes

42
(Atkinson 1999a; Valle 1999; Gross et al., 2002; Salager-Meyer et al, 2003). Changes in

educational systems thus also bring about changes in writing styles. The latest research on Slavic

languages is a case in point. It indeed shows a growing influence of Anglo-American rhetoric on

the changing nature of textual patterns in Slavic scientific writing (Petric 2005; Yakhontova,

2001, 2002a). Yakhontova (2002a) argues that this is due to the fact that Ukranian society

(traditionally collaborative, homogeneous and non-conflicting) is only recently starting to get

market experience that affects its academic spheres. This, of course, coincides with the growing

influence of English as a global language of science and technology.

Rhetorical and stylistic changes have also been observed in Korean academic writing

which is adopting a Western-influenced linear style (Eggingto, 1987) and in Chinese academic

journals (Shi, 2002) which “are changing rapidly to adopt the international (Anglo-

American/Western) style and format of publication” (Shi, 2002, p. 628). A progressive stylistic

uniformity has also been noted in letters of application written in Flemish, Finnish and English

(Upton and Connor 2001) covering a 10-year period, letters of the early 1990’s showing greater

differences between cultural groups whereas those of later years evidenced a more homogenized

style. A universal form of letter of application may very well be in progress in the global

business environment.

The growing influence of British and American rhetoric has also been noted in Spanish

academic writing in the use of causal metatext (Moreno, 1997) and in the evolution of the

linguistic formulation of criticism which used to be conveyed in a very aggressive, personal and

face threatening fashion up to the 1960s and which, for a number of social, historical and

political reasons Salager-Meyer et al. (2003) analyze in depth, is now expressed in a much more

subdued, modalized and impersonal “Anglo-American” way. Moreno and Salager et al. explain

43
that the similarities observed rest in part in the extent to which Spanish and Latin American

education is today influenced by English-speaking academia. The majority of graduate level

texts and materials in the Spanish-speaking world, for instance, are translations of books

originally written in English, and most academics, especially those in the hard fields, resort to

English language sources for their teaching and research purposes. It should be noted, however,

that Salager et al.’s research is confined to the medical field, and that Moreno’s work is based on

a very small rhetorical feature of articles, limitations which do not permit any broad inference

about the comparative rhetoric of text organization in Spanish and English.

In spite of the importance of socio-political and ideological factors in shaping scientific

writing, there is some evidence that these factors may have less influence than purely cultural

ones (Vassileva, 2000), although both are intertwined.

6.5 Influence of audience size

The size and local character of the discourse community is also an important factor that

has to be taken into consideration in the shaping of scientific writing conventions, as studies

from sociolinguistic and sociocognitive perspectives confirm (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995;

Golebiowski 1998; Melander 1998; Swales 2004).

Ahmad, for example, suggests that the reluctance of Malaysian scientists to engage in a

more conflictual and challenging style of discourse is due to the small size of the Malaysian

discourse community where everybody may be familiar with the work of others. Research in

Malay thus means addressing a small, perhaps even local readership, not a large international

audience. In such a constrained context, indicating a gap in others’ research is then not a prime

concern. What is more important is to justify the study being reported as a valid and rigorous

44
area of research and with emphasizing Malaysian need to develop research programs. Indeed, in

a developing country such as Malaysia where research activities in many areas are only at the

beginning stage, there are huge gaps wherever one turns and quite a number of research areas

have yet to develop a research tradition. The metaphor of competing for an ecological niche in a

wider research ecosystem thus does not really apply here.

In a more recent study, Burgess (2002) found that the nature and size of the audience was

a more important variable than specialization or language of publication in the choice of

rhetorical practices in the introductions of articles published in international linguistics journals,

Hispanic studies journals and English language studies published in both Spanish and English.

6.6 Interplay of disciplinary and national cultures

A few contrastive studies of scientific discourse have suggested that cross-cultural

differences may be small when compared to differences between disciplines and sub-disciplines

(Taylor & Chen 1991) or between professional and colloquial registers. In fact, it is a dimension

that has rarely been taken into consideration, even though it sometimes seems to neutralize

potential cultural proclivities, as has been shown by Clyne (1983) who argues that there appears

to be disciplines (e.g., mathematics and engineering) in which German scientists have adopted a

basically linear structure. This state of affair may thus be conditioned by the discipline or the

leadership in the discipline by English speakers. Similar conclusions have been reached by

Melander, Swales and Fredrickson (1997) with Swedish abstracts from three different

disciplines. The more recent research conducted by Yakhontova (2002b) on abstracts in two

different fields (applied mathematics and linguistics) written in Ukranian, Russian and English

45
also shows essentially interdisciplinary differences between the two sets of data, and reveals a

complex interaction of various factors that have marked the abstracts.

Disciplinary conventions and context thus interplay with national cultural influences and

this these influences may even be particularly prominent in fields marked by a more universal

character of cognitive paradigms (e.g., in the so-called ‘hard sciences’).

7 Conclusions

We have sought to emphasize in this review that research writing is a social enterprise both in

the sense that it is an immediate engagement with colleagues and that it is mediated by the social

cultures and institutions within which it occurs. Research papers, for example, do not simply

report research but present it in ways acceptable to a discipline and a society. In today’s highly

competitive research world, academic writing functions to shape information for the needs of an

audience, accomplish a writer’s own rhetorical purposes, and establish him or herself within a

discipline and wider context. Such writing is important because it offers a window into the

values, beliefs and practices of disciplinary communities. It shows us how disciplines help to

create a view of the world through their writing and the ways that texts are influenced by the

problems, social practices and ways of thinking of particular social groups. Writing practices are

deeply embedded in the epistemological and social convictions of scientific disciplines.

This is just one example of how the structures and roles of language which have evolved

in one context are adapted for use in very different ones, providing the means for constructing

knowledge in fields as diverse as medicine and mechanics. In fact, the development of literacy,

with its enormous impact on mode of communication and genre, has itself helped to reshape

these contexts. The spread of science in the 18th century accompanied a desire to establish a

46
literacy of empirical enquiry, a new ‘univocal discourse’ (Foucault; 1974) which could represent

real events without the mediation of rhetoric. Logic was imposed on grammar, dictionaries and

taxonomies emerged, and the perception that a correct use of language bestowed social prestige

grew. The use of writing to capture events for analysis could, however, never establish one-to-

one correspondences between words and things, but an expository and argument-oriented

literacy emerged to eventually supplant in influence a more event and narrative oriented one.

In recent years a great deal of attention has been given to the rhetorical conventions of

academic expositions in a number of different languages. The results of this cross-linguistic

research indicate that scientific writing depends upon the milieu and the period in which it

develops, and that research reporting is language/culture bound. Indeed, because social context

always impinges on language, all writing is strongly anchored in the values of the cultures that

people get socialized into when they learn how to write, values that are inculcated and

transmitted through national educational systems. These systems are neither static nor

immutable but dynamic, potentially influenced by external social, cultural and political

influences, as we have noted in connection with scientific writing in Slavic languages. These

factors can alter peoples’ vision of the world and, consequently, what they understand as “truth”.

The impact of such wider societal and ideological trends, and the political dimension underlying

academic practices, therefore constitute important sources of writing change.

We are aware of the partial coverage of this paper, despite its length. The massive

explosion of research into scientific and academic writing over the past decade or so has meant

we have been able to mention only a few of the key genres, theories and studies in this area. In

particular, we are aware of work on other academic genres such as essays, acknowledgements,

and grant applications and the growing research into internet communications, web-resources

47
such as wikis, and the potential effects of grid technologies on writing and instruction. We have

only been able to touch on writing in foreign language instruction and English for academic

purposes teaching, and have been unable to mention the numerous contributions of Library and

Information Science research to our understanding of writing. Despite these limitations,

however, we hope to have provided a sufficiently broad overview of current developments and

understandings of science writing from the perspective of applied linguistics.

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i
The Philosophical Transactions are still published today, whereas the Journal des Sçavans (renamed Journal des Savants
in 1816), ceased publication in 1792.
ii
Metadiscourse refers to those aspects of a text which explicitly refer to the organisation of the discourse or the
writer’s stance towards its content or the reader.

The CARS model seems to have made its appearance in the 1960’s (see Bazerman 1988 for a study of its evolution in
iii

physics article introductions, Dudley Evans and Henderson 1990 in economics and Gunnarsson 1989 in medicine). Valle
(1999) argues that when the CARS model was used in the 17 th century, it was not for situating the text within the
background of previous knowledge or for indicating a gap in that knowledge, but for juxtaposing and dialogizing different
views.
iv
The “reader-responsible” vs. “writer responsible” typology of language was introduced by Hinds in 1987 in his
comparative studies of Japanese vs. English scientific writing, and was later qualified as “dialogic” or expository vs.
“monologic” or contemplative (Cmerjková and Danes 1997).
v
A linear text features propositions leading directly to the ones following them with each part of each proposition
following the one higher in the hierarchy. ‘Digression’ is understood as the other end of the linear scale.
vi
For a definition of the ‘received’ and the ‘alternative/non-standard’ view of culture, see Atkinson 1999b).

68