Interaction in academic writing: learning to argue with the reader

Abstract

The view of written texts as embodying interaction between the writer and reader is now well established, and underlies many aspects that may be focused on in the training of novice writers of academic text. In this paper, I argue that interaction can draw on both interactive and interactional resources: interactive resources help to guide the reader through the text, while interactional resources involve the reader collaboratively in the development of the text. I use the concept of the 'reader-in-the-text' (Thompson and Thetela 1995) to explore a central form of interactional resource: the inclusion in the text of a voice that is intended to be attributable to the reader. I identify a particular set of discourse contexts in which this happens - where the writer brings in the reader's view in order to contradict it - and outline the lexico-grammatical features which signal the other voice in those contexts; and I place these in a broader perspective on written text as a stage-managed form of dialogue. The impetus for the study comes from working with novice writers; and I discuss a number of examples where written drafts were improved by exploiting the interactional resources described, and argue for the value of raising students' awareness of these resources.