Stance refers to the ways academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible accuracy or creditability of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition or the reader. Stance concerns writer-oriented features of interaction which can be presented by four interpersonal categories. These categories are boosters, e.g. 'must, clearly', hedges, e.g. 'may, possibly', self-mentions, e.g. 'I, me' and attitude markers, e.g. 'interesting, surprisingly'. Stance features between L1 and L2 writers have been investigated by several researchers highlighting how L2 writers have adopted similar/different stance from their L1 peers. Most research attributed the differences of quantities and types of stance markers between native and non-native English writers to their culture. While these explanations could be reasonable, they appear to be intuition-based as these studies have been quantitative-based, examining writers' stance from the view that texts are an artefact of activity, independent of specific contexts and outside the personal experiences of authors and audience, and dealing with culture from its static meaning rather than viewing culture as dynamic which may inform more detailed information about writer's motivations and reasons for using metadiscourse markers.Accordingly, there is a need for more qualitative research to better understand L1 and L2 text writers' thoughts, routines and strategies when using certain markers, and how their lexical choices meet their readers' expectations. There is also a need to collect feedback from the expert audience on how they see successful/less successful stance patterns in academic texts. Therefore, this book is based on research that fills in this gap; a mixed-method approach was applied by first examining quantitatively two corpora of texts: one by native English writers and the other by EFL writers native of Arabic. And then, discourse-based interviews were conducted, first, with some of the text writers to report on their perceptions to use certain stance markers, and second, with expert academic audience to characterise successful / less successful features of stance-taking in English academic writing.

The nature of interaction between authors and readers of written texts varies from language to language. This is particularly evident in specialized texts and their translations. Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani unveils the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as the writer-reader interaction in translations of legal and political texts in an English-Persian context. Using a corpus-based methodology and resorting to parallel and reference corpora, he explores systematically the use of metadiscourse features and their distribution in original texts and in translations in English and Persian. In addition, parallel concordance lines are used to examine the way writer-reader interaction is constructed and guided in translation and non-translation language in English and Persian.

First released in 2005, Ken Hyland's Metadiscourse has become a canonical account of how language is used in written communication. 'Metadiscourse' is defined as the ways that writers reflect on their texts to refer to themselves, their readers or the text itself. It is a key resource in language as it allows the writer to engage with readers in familiar and expected ways and as such it is an important tool for students of academic writing in both the L1 and L2 context. This book achieves for main goals: - to provide an accessible introduction to metadiscourse, discussing its role and importance in written communication and reviewing current thinking on the topic - to explore examples of metadiscourse in a range of texts from business, academic, journalistic, and student writing - to offer a new theory of metadiscourse - to show the relevance of this theory to students, academics and language teachers The book shows how writers use the devices of metadiscourse to adjust the level of personality in their texts, to offer a representation of themselves and their arguments. It shows how these tools help the reader organise, interpret and evaluate the information presented in the text. Knowing how to identify metadiscourse as a reader is a key skill to be learnt by students of discourse analysis and this book makes this a central goal.

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

Teaching writing across the curriculum with online tools

No two writing situations are exactly the same and skilled writers, like skilled painters, must develop the know-how to represent the objects of their writing as part of a flexible art. This special art of writing lies hidden between grammar--the well-formedness of sentences--and genre--the capacity of texts to perform culturally holistic communicative functions (e.g., the memo, the strategic report, the letter to the editor). Concealed between grammar and genre, this less visible art of writing is what Kaufer and Butler call "representational composition." Texts within this hidden art are best viewed not primarily as grammatical units or as genre functions, but as bearers of design elements stimulating imagistic, narrative, and information-rich worlds, and as an invitation to readers to explore and interact with them. This volume presents a systematic study of the principles that underlie writing as representational composition. Drawing from student models derived from a studio method, the authors use each chapter to present a different aspect of what unfolds--across the course of the book--into a cumulative, interactive, and unified body of representational principles underlying the design of texts. They reveal what makes the textual representations achieved by expert writers worthwhile, and, at the same time, difficult for novice writers to reproduce. Extending the framework of their 1996 volume, Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, into a realm of textual design, this volume will interest students and instructors of writing, rhetoric, and information design.