Representing readers in writing: Student and expert practices

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The importance of establishing a connection with readers in academic writing is now widely acknowledged. The growing literature on this topic, however, has largely concentrated on published ‘expert’ texts and on the ways that writers use language to project their stance or identity. In contrast, this paper will focus on strategies which writers use to represent their readers rather than themselves, using language to structure and negotiate relationships with their addressees. Using a framework of ‘engagement’ (Hyland, K. (2001). Bringing in the reader: Addressee features in academic writing. Written Communication, 18(4), 549–574; Hyland, K. (2005a). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–191), the paper examines a corpus of 64 project reports (650,000 words) written by final year Hong Kong undergraduates together with transcripts of interviews with students. The work sets out to explore how writers seek to explicitly establish the presence of their readers in this genre and to compare these with the practices of professional academics in research papers, going on to show how the different purposes of these writers influence the construction of the reader in the text. The analysis contributes to our understanding of audience engagement and the dialogic nature of persuasion in academic argument, but also suggests how students understand their readers and express these understandings in writing.