Writer's Attitude Research Articles

Persuasion and context: The pragmatics of academic metadiscourse

Metadiscourse refers to aspects of a text which explicitly organise the discourse, engage the audience and signal the writer's attitude. Its use by writers to guide readers and display an appropriate professional persona is an important aspect of persuasive writing. Its role in establishing and maintaining contact between the writer and the reader and between the writer and the message also makes it a central pragmatic concept. Based on a textual analysis of 28 research articles in four academic disciplines, this paper seeks to show how the appropriate use of metadiscourse crucially depends on rhetorical context. The study identifies a taxonomy of metadiscourse functions and suggests that metadiscourse reflects one way in which context and linguistic meaning are integrated to allow readers to derive intended interpretations. It is argued that metadiscourse provides writers with a means of constructing appropriate contexts and alluding to shared disciplinary assumptions. The study of academic metadiscourse can therefore offer insights into our understanding of this concept and illuminate an important dimension of rhetorical variation among disciplinary communities.

Physicians and gumshoes: prescription for bad medicine, or the man who didn't like doctors.

Raymond Chandler, the creator of legendary detective Philip Marlowe and the recipient of increasing literary admiration over the past 40 years, used numerous physicians as minor characters in his novels and short stories. The presence of physicians as minor characters in Chandler's work, though unnoticed by previous critics, is illustrative both of the writer's personal antipathy towards medical doctors and larger societal forces which left medical charlatans free to open "clinics." Chandler's own chronic health problems and those of his wife Cissy may have contributed to the writer's negative attitude toward medicine and health care, though little is known of Chandler's personal interactions with physicians prior to his death in 1959.

The use of metadiscourse in good and poor ESL essays

A text is composed of two parts: propositional content and metadiscourse features. Metadiscourse features are those facets of a text which make the organization of the text explicit, provide information about the writer's attitude toward the text content, and engage the reader in the interaction. In this study, we analyze the metadiscourse in persuasive essays written by English as a second language (ESL) university students. Half of the essays received good ratings and half received poor ratings. Differences between the two sets were found in the number of words, number of T-units, and density of metadiscourse features. When features were analyzed as a proportion of number of T-units, differences were found in all categories. Furthermore, the good essays showed a greater variety of metadiscourse features within each category than the poor essays. It is proposed that skilled writers have an awareness of the needs of their readers and control the strategies for making their texts more considerate and accessible to the reader. Poor writers, on the other hand, are not able to generate considerate texts.

Using C-Qualities in Communications

Abstract The C-quality concept is one of the 10 concepts that students develop for writing business letters in principles of business communications. The C-qualities may be divided into two categories: (a) clear thinking—completeness (thoroughness), clearness (distinctness), conciseness (succinctness), concreteness (vividness), and correctness (accuracy); and (b) writer attitude—courtesy (respect), and consideration (thoughtfulness).

Houses of the Mind: The Architecture of Childhood

L Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (published in 1947), the Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov records his Russian memories in English, then translates them into Russian, then rewrites them in English. He is so concerned about getting his facts right that he claims to have traveled back to Russia as a biographer in order to investigate his own past, visiting places of his childhood and interviewing old friends and relatives. He maintains in the foreword that this was the sake of truth. Nabokov's statement of concern for over-all truth is intended ironically, however. For the notion of childhood's having an official history, which can be replayed, like old films, is no longer valid for a postmodern writer like Nabokov. In fact, psychoanalysts now assume their clients to be talking of present truths in terms of their reconstructions of the past, rather than recalling true past experiences. Autobiographies tend to reveal the writer's attitude about his or her past, not the past itself. For example, a recollection of a darkened room in Speak, Memory presents Nabokov's adult perception of how the gathering dusk once acted upon his young senses:

Contrastive ESP rhetoric: Metatext in Finnish-English economics texts

This article describes a contrastive textlinguistic study of rhetorical differences between texts written by academics with different cultural backgrounds. It is assumed that, despite a relative uniformity of academic papers imposed by requirements of the genre, there is significant intercultural variation in the rhetorical preferences of writers. The cultural differences between texts written by Finnish and Anglo-American academics are explored with respect to metatext use in papers from economics journals. The results indicate that Anglo-American writers use more metatext or text about text than Finnish writers. It seems that Anglo-American writers are more concerned with guiding and orienting the reader than Finns, and show more explicit presence of the writer in the text. This is taken to reflect a more reader-oriented attitude, a more positive notion of politeness, and a generally more explicit textual rhetoric. Finnish writers show a more negative kind of politeness and a greater tendency towards implicitness in their writing. Such differences may result in unintentionally inefficient rhetoric when the target audience does not share the writer's assumptions and attitudes.

The role of observers' expectations in attitude attribution

Two studies examined the role that observers' expectations play in producing correspondence bias in the attitude attribution paradigm. In the first study, subjects participated in groups of five. In each session, four subject observers witnessed a fifth subject (the writer) being assigned an essay topic and recorded their expectations about the likely extremity and quality of that essay. Later, the writer read her essay aloud and observers made judgments about the (actual) essay and the writer's attitude. Results indicated that observers had earlier underestimated the extremity and quality of the writer's essay. Partially as a result, observers then overestimated the extent to which the writer's personal postessay attitude corresponded to the direction of the essay. This correspondence bias appears to be the result of two faulty assumptions. First, observers assumed that the preessay attitude of the writer tended to correspond to the direction of the essay. Second, observers assumed that the writer's attitude became more extreme in the process of composing the essay. A final experiment manipulated observers' expectations and demonstrated their effect on correspondence bias. The results are discussed in terms of a schematic model of interpersonal perception.

Objects in Novels and the Fringe of Culture: Graham Greene and Alain Robbe-Grillet

G RAHAM GREENE and Alain Robbe-Grillet deal in opposite ways with a certain hurdle or springboard (depending on the writer's attitude) that confronts every novelist; recent theory has named it the intertext. Greene, comfortable with the conventions of the novel, accepts and exploits the intertext and integrates it into his narrative technique. Robbe-Grillet, in contrast, attempts to subvert the conventional novel by attacking the intertext, which he seems to describe with his term des franges de culture, the fringe of culture. We can see the two novelists' opposite assumptions about this fringe of culture at work in their narrative techniques, particularly in the ways they render objects and in the ways they make objects and descriptions of objects function in their texts. Greene is the sort of novelist who rarely wins notice in most recent post-structuralist or narratological criticism. After all, he rejected the Modernism of his fellow British novelists, and even the Nouveau Roman of his adopted country. Still, valid narratological analysis should be able to deal with the techniques of conventional novelists like Greene, as well as those of consciously experimental ones like Robbe-Grillet. Furthermore, if we want to analyze the function of objects and descriptions in novels, Greene is especially attractive because of his well-known seedy settings, his visible realities so distinctive that critics have given them a geographical name-Greeneland. For my purpose I have chosen

発話者の心的態度からみた助詞「は」と「が」の使い分け

The purpose of this study was to examine the usage of Japanese particles “wa” and “ga” based on speaker's attitude of mind. To consider the education of Japanese for foreigners, hypotheses were built up pragmatically ; a speaker used “wa” to lay emphasis on the following part of a sentence which particles divide, and “ga” to emphasize the preceding phrase. It was opposed to given-new information hypothesis. The first study investigated the different usages of “wa” and “ga” on the first sentences appearing in newspapers. The results showed that “wa” was much used in economic pages as “ga” was rather used in social ones. It suggested that the different usages of “wa” and “ga” were related to a writer's different attitude of mind. The second study investigated different usages by undergraduates when asked to select appropriate particles in given sentences and to write their reasons why they selected them. It suggested that the selection of the particles depended on how to lay emphasis rather than on given-new information.

What Does it Take to Reduce Observer Bias?

The strength of the observer bias in the attribution of attitudes is further demonstrated. Observers read an essay purportedly written by another student. Some were told that the writer freely chose the position taken in the essay, some were told that the writer was assigned the position taken, and some were told that the writer was required to write a counterattitudinal essay. Although perceived freedom for the essay writer was less and confidence in their judgements was less, observers still judged the writer's attitude to be congruent with the position taken in the essay even when told that the behavior was the opposite of the writer's true beliefs. The reasons for such an apparently illogical judgement are discussed.

The Perceived Value of Constrained Behavior: Pressures Toward Biased Inference in the Attitude Attribution Paradigm

Two experiments investigated observer bias in the attitude attribution paradigm. In the first, subjects assessed the usefulness of a constrained essay prior to attributing the writer's attitude. Contrary to the prevailing view that subjects are inattentive to situationalforces, a majority indicated that the essay was usefulfor nhaking an attribution about the writer. Subsequent attitude attributions, however, revealed a pronounced bias toward correspondent inference. That the same subjects judged the essay to be not useful yet proceeded to make a biased attribution suggests that there are strong pressures in the paradigm itself to use the essay to make the required judgment. A second experiment indicated that considerably more favorable impressions were formed about an attributor who had made a relatively extreme attribution regarding the writer's attitude. Even when the essay had been assigned to the writer, a discounting judgment was viewed in relatively unfavorable terms. The context of this experimental paradigm appears to sanction the informational value of the essay and to impose pressures to attempt a dispositional inference. As traditionally executed, the paradigm may prevent a majority of subjects from expressing reservations concerning the value of the constrained essay.

Toward an understanding of the fundamental attribution error: Essay diagnosticity in the attitude attribution paradigm

The observer error in attitude attribution was examined, focusing upon the perceiver's conception of the relationship between a writer's attitude and the quality of performance on an essay task. Subjects appear to have invested essays, written under assignment, with diagnostic value on the presumption of a correlation between the quality or strength of the essay and the writer's attitude. When subjects were given essays varying in direction, strength, and constraint, their attributions indicated a reversal of correspondent inference for weak essays produced under high constraint, replicating an earlier, conceptually important result ( E. E. Jones, S. Worchel, G. R. Goethals, & J. Grumet, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971 , 7, 59–80). It was suggested that the attribution error need not reflect general misunderstandings about, or the low salience of, situational factors, but rather is based on the perceiver's inclination to adopt a diagnostic judgmental set in the attitude attribution paradigm.

Johannes Bobrowski's `Klosterbei Nowgorod': An Essay in Interpretation

Since the death of Johannes Bobrowski in 1965 much critical attention has been focused on his work — the poems of his four published volumes of verse, his two novels, and his shorter prose pieces. Common to all these evaluations, whether they have been by interpreters from East or West, has been the reliance on those statements of Bobrowski recorded in the valuable volume Selbstzeugnisse in which he describes his basic theme as historical: `das Verhaltnis der Deutschen zu den ostlichen Nachbarvolkern, dieses Verhaltnis, das also in der Histo rie durch mancherlei Misverstandnisse, auch durch Schuld, belastet ist' (Sz, p. 32).' While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with accepting the theoretical statements of an author about his own works, there are none the less dangers. First, it is possible to become too restrictive, too dogmatic, in one's approach to the work, and the tendency to see the writer's theories in the work just because he says they are there can often lead to a narrowing of the work's achievement, to the possible failure to grasp the work's deeper level of meaning. Secondly, and this applies particularly to Bobrowski, it can often fail to take into account any development or change in the writer's thinking or attitudes: in other words, Bobrowski's thematic is seen as static, whereas in actual fact his ideas towards the end of his second volume of verse, Schattenland Strome, were in transition, moving away from the restricted historical outlook to a more universal reference. It is one of the poems towards the end of this collection, `Kloster bei Nowgorod' (G, p. 97), with which this article will be concerned.

Richard Wright's Image of France

When richard wright died in November 1960, many of the Parisian obituaries quoted Wright's statement that “this [France] is the place where I could die.” Having lived in France for some sixteen years, Wright to some degree had become part of the Parisian intellectual setting and was mourned by the French as though he were a compatriot. Conversely, in the United States many saw in Wright's death-in-exile not only a comment on the racial situation in America but a reflection of the writer's personal attitudes. Some, white and black, resented his choice of living elsewhere. Some remembered the dedication of The Outsider—“To Rachel, my daughter who was born on alien soil”—and were offended by the dedication of Eight Men: “To my friends, Helene, Michel, and Thierry Maurice-Bokanowski whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land.”

Entropy and Redundancy in Decadent Style: Translating Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

code may suggest why we eventually find wholesomeness a refreshing relief.2 But note eventually: neither the gross appeal to sensation signalled by Symons, the movement's own historian, nor the subtle oxymorons revealed by Riffaterre, one of the current critical luminaries, accounts for the tediousness of Decadent writing. Indeed, descriptions of Decadent style-and we have mentioned only two at the chronological poles-make Decadent writing sound rather interesting, even intrinsically worth reading. Personally, I would never claim that it is either entertaining or provocative; on the contrary, I would claim that not a single piece can hold our attention on its own merits qua literature. But at the same time I would claim that it is worth intensive study not just by various interdisciplinary specialists of the period but by students of language, style, and translation. Its flaws-or, perhaps more properly, its deviation from recurring norms of taste-can contribute to our appreciation of reference, association and transfer. Its pace-or its blockage of sequentiality-can contribute to our appreciation of information flow in literature and its indispensable temporality. In the end, it may well be that Decadent writers misuse the space-time components of poesy, and that misuse would help explain why we find them everlasting bores. It may well be also that a translator is best poised to realize what is being effected in Decadent expression. After all, a translator by analysis and instinct must work his way back to the source writer's attitudes in order to reproduce in another language a comparable articulative process and result. In any event, that is how I arrived at the observations which follow.3 The standing of Villers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-89) is a, if not the, quintessential Decadent, makes him an inevitable case in point. His last fully executed work L'Eve future (1880-85) is a novel so compendious that we can use it as both glossary and grammar of Decadent rhetoric. We can take our examples from the climax, the final forty pages, when Lord Ewald receives the automaton Hadaly fabricated by Edison.4 These extracts will be adequate to show first that the expression is radically iconographic lexically, syntactically, narratively. Villiers, who was simultaneously licentious and puritanical, in this novel keeps sensual reference within the bounds of conservative good taste. But if his referents here are not blatantly gross

THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION

Abstract Following an earlier investigation in which children's ability to discriminate emotion verbally was examined #opEducational Review, 25, 2#cp, the aim of this study was to discover how good a sample of eleven‐year‐olds were at communicating their emotions in writing. The children's written responses to a BBC Drama Worship programme and a series of short films were analysed by two panels of judges, the judges’ ratings then being tested against the questionnaire replies which the children also provided. The research indicated that the ability to communicate emotion verbally tends to be more highly developed in girls than in boys, and in middle class than working class children. More importantly, emotion, it was found, is communicated most effectively when it relates to a writer's attitudes, rather than to his internal feelings or powers of empathy.

Balance and the Writer's Attitude in News Stories and Editorials

Students who disagreed with a hypothetical editorial policy leaned over backwards in writing news stories and editorials. Their stories were the most one-sided and their editorials the most partisan.

Emphasis on empathy: Why is technical report writing an agony?

No major improvement in technical reporting will be achieved until the attitudes of writers and readers are either changed or widely understood and compensated for.

The Responsibility of States for International Propaganda

The tendency in recent world history toward the establishment of political parties based on class or racial ideologies in which no place of respect is given to established territorial boundaries has greatly intensified the problem of the responsibility of states in connection with international propaganda. Two main questions arise: (1) Are states themselves obliged under international law to refrain from spreading propaganda in a foreign country hostile to its government? and (2) Are they obliged to use due diligence to prevent private individuals and organizations from engaging in such activity? The purpose of this study is to seek the answer to these questions through an analysis of the sources of international law referred to in Article 38 of the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice: (a) international conventions, (b) diplomatic exchanges, giving evidence of international custom, (c) general principles embodied in municipal laws and judicial decisions, and (d) the attitude of writers on international law. Treatment of the subject will begin here with the period of the French Revolution and will be limited to peace-time political propaganda. The problem is, of course, much older and broader than these limits suggest, but it is believed that their extension would not contribute materially to the purpose at hand.

Quantitative Measurement in Economic History

The writer's general attitude toward economic history, 167. — Motives, conscious and unconscious, 169. — Unreliability of contemporary opinion, 171. — Population figures, 174. — Forestry, 176. — Coke on the Baltic trade, 176. — Problems of development, 179. — Value of statistics collected for other purposes, 180. — Statistical presentation of non-numerical facts, 180. — Inferences concerning matters outside the scope of materials themselves, 181. — Failure of data to reveal what might be expected, 184. — Swedish capitation tax, 184. — Importance of what the sources are about, 188. — Customs accounts, 189. — Comparing data from different sources, etc., 189. — Mathematical treatment, 190. — Small factors with great influence, 192. — Cause and effect, 193.