Metadiscourse in the Retrospective PhD by Publication: More or Less the Same?

Abstract

Metadiscourse is fundamentally the interaction that takes place within a text between the author and the reader. Previous studies have established the importance of metadiscourse in both the traditional monograph PhD theses and the academic research article, regardless of academic discipline. There has been some initial research to understand the particular genre requirements of the Retrospective PhD by Publication, but little work has been done to understand the rhetorical task of writing the commentary text where the task is to synthesise and reflect on one’s own work to produce new understanding and knowledge. The goal here is to compare the metadiscourse in the commentary texts that comprise a major part of the retrospective PhD by Publication to doctoral dissertations written in the more traditional way. Detailed analysis of two corpora of the different texts was done using ANTCONC software and the results were then evaluated using the chi-square test to check for significance. Finally, a functional model of metadiscourse was used to better understand the implications of the findings. Results suggest that there are significant variations in the way that metadiscourse is deployed in these two text types. The most important differences were in the overall reduced use of metadiscourse features and in particular, engagement markers and endophoric reference were significantly less prevalent. Self-mentions, however, were a much stronger feature of the Retrospective PhD by Publication commentaries. The functional analysis of the findings allows us to draw some initial conclusions about the meaning of these differences.

Introduction

The globalisation of higher education has arguably contributed to a greater diversity in the systems of knowledge production and as Lee (2011) has argued, only heightened innovation and creativity. The “massification” (e.g., Giannakis & Bullivant, 2016) of advanced learning means that doctoral programs have seen a rise in enrolments as, for example, people who have been working for many years in educational contexts are now, increasingly, required, or encouraged, to have a terminal degree. The Retrospective PhD by Publication is a qualification where candidates have created a dossier of peer-reviewed publications and are required to write a reflective piece, or a commentary, of usually between 10,000 and 15,000 words, and where the rhetorical goal is to capture “the originality, coherence, connectivity and their contribution to knowledge in their subject area” (Smith, 2014). The self-reflexive nature of this task necessarily requires a particular identity and stance for authors, in relation to their readers, their academic community, and the data that becomes central in the retrospective research narrative (Asongu & Nwachukwu, 2018). To document and better understand how this stance is being constructed discoursally, I focus here on the use of metadiscourse in a comparative analysis of two corpora. I compare corpus data from more traditional monograph doctoral dissertations with data from Retrospective PhD by Publication commentaries. This comparative analysis provides insight into the rhetorical task of using written work that the author has already published as the basis for a doctoral thesis. Metadiscourse can be defined as “the linguistic resources used to organize a discourse or the writer’s stance towards its contents or reader” (Hyland, 2017, p.109), and is a key element in the social and communicative engagement between writer and reader (Hyland & Tse, 2004). As such, metadiscourse is a crucial resource for writers to establish their stance and credibility within their own academic fields. The metadiscourse of a text reflects and constitutes the social and cultural context within which these texts are created; this means that a functional analysis of how authors from within a genre are relating to their audience can be of particular significance in understanding rhetorical variance and change. As Kuhi and Behnam (2011) suggest, “textual realizations of interpersonality in academic writing—metadiscourse—are intimately linked to the social and cultural forces that play constitutive roles in the structure of academy” (p. 130). Metadiscourse represents a key textual feature to gauge shifts and differences in the ways in which writers are relating to themselves and peers within the academy, and therefore to the process of knowledge generation itself. If we consider Lemke’s (2000) view of discourse as an open, dynamic system, what are the ways in which these conventions are therefore now being developed within the Retrospective PhD by Publication? My goal in trying to answer this question, is broadly in keeping with that of Dewey and Jenkins (2010), to “describe how the language is manipulated in innovative ways to suit the communicative needs of speakers who interact in complex multilingual communities of practice” (p. 89). In this instance, my concern is with how the written word is used innovatively to reflect the emergent communicative needs of authors, completing a doctoral study, who are in a sense already well-established members of the academy. The more traditional monograph PhD dissertation text can be seen as a moment of arrival for the new academic (Benmore, 2016). It has been described as the text, for example, where graduate students learn to appropriate discourse conventions in disciplinary communities (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993). In the case of Retrospective PhD by Publication, of course, the author is by definition an established member of their chosen field who is familiar with the discourse conventions required, and it is this tension between the writer, the audience, and the wider academy, that I wish to explore here.

For academics involved in the supervision of Retrospective PhD by Publication candidates, this analysis may potentially inform future guidance practices, as well as offer insight for doctoral students engaging with this rhetorical task. Much of the literature that surrounds the writing of the doctoral dissertation can be characterized as “the advice genre” (Kamler & Thomson, 2008) where students are advised to follow a prescribed set of guidelines on organisation, tone, and structure. As Kamler and Thomson (2008) argue, however, writing a doctoral dissertation is perhaps better defined in terms of “text work/identity work” (p. 508). By this we mean that texts and identities are formed together, in, and through writing. Unpacking aspects of this textual identity work, may inform the pedagogy surrounding doctoral supervision, and suggest a process of collaborative engagement, including assessment of the full range of rhetorical features that are possible (see also Chong, 2021).

Metadiscourse and Academic Research

Metadiscourse has been established as a major element in the understanding of academic rhetoric (Hyland, 2005). Early attempts to capture the dynamic interplay between the author and the reader have focused on different linguistic instantiations of this relationship in what has been termed a “narrow” perspective on metadiscourse (e.g., Mauranen, 1993a, b; Valero-Garces, 1996) where research has focused primarily on textual cohesion and the way in which an author signals relationship between different parts of the text.

Hyland and Tse (2004) and Hyland (2005) have been instrumental in developing a more complete and unified model of metadiscourse (see Table 5.1) in which they argue that all metadiscourse is essentially interpersonal. This distinction means that the earlier focus on propositional and interpersonal meanings in a text is not helpful, since the interpersonal aspects of a text are in fact a crucial part of how the propositional meaning is created. A distinction is made therefore, been interactive and interactional elements as depicted in Table 5.1 below.

Table 5.1 Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse functions

Briefly, interactive elements allow the writer to manage information flow and to explicitly establish preferred interpretations, by guiding the reader through the text and highlighting or downplaying aspects of the meaning as it unfolds. These linguistic items organize discourse to anticipate the readers’ knowledge and reflect the writer’s assessment of what aspects of the text need to be made explicit to guide the reader towards understanding. Interactional resources, however, focus on participants of the interaction and work to show a writer’s persona and a tenor consistent with disciplinary expectations. Metadiscourse here concerns the writer’s efforts to control the level of personality in a text and establish a suitable relationship to the data, arguments, and audience, marking the degree of intimacy, the expression of attitude, the communication of commitments, and the extent of reader involvement (Hyland, 2005, p. 138).

Metadiscourse and Post-graduate Writing

Comparative, corpus-based research using this more complete view of metadiscourse (e.g., Hyland & Tse, 2004) suggests an interesting feature of postgraduate dissertations, in relation to other academic texts. Through comparative analysis, it has shown that when compared to Master’s (MA) Theses, the doctoral texts contained 10% more interactive forms. They also were able to show that hedges dominated interactional categories in both text types (40% in the PhDs and 44% in the master’s theses) and transition markers the interactive group (36% and 41% respectively). In their corpus, evidentials and code glosses were the next most frequent interactive devices and engagement markers representing a fifth of both masters and doctoral interactional devices. The doctoral texts in general contained much more metadiscourse, with 73% of all cases in the study and 35% more when normed for text length. Hyland and Tse (2004, p. 172) argue that the variations in metadiscourse frequencies are partly due to the fact that the PhD dissertation text is twice as long as the typical MA dissertation, making it necessary for writers to employ more interactive devices to structure more discursively elaborated arguments. However, the higher frequencies in the doctoral texts also indicate a deeper engagement with the reader and go some way towards the writers presenting themselves as insiders within their disciplinary fields.

Evidence for this claim can be seen with the much higher use of evidentials, with over four times the number of intertextual references. Citation is a key resource for demonstrating membership of an academic community where one’s own ideas are contextualized and presented alongside those of the established community of writers and academics. For the writers of the MA thesis, there is likely to be less time available for the research, and the concern may be more with completing the degree and continuing on to employment with that degree. As a result, there is less need to demonstrate a full membership with the target academic community. It was also found in the study that doctoral students used more interactional metadiscourse markers, with a particularly higher use of engagement markers and self-mentions. Self-mention is an important rhetorical device for the promotion of self as a competent and scholarly member of the field. In many academic writing guides, the use of the first-person pronoun is generally not advised (e.g., Strunk, 2007), bringing, it is assumed, an informal and conversational element to writing. In practice, however, it plays a crucial interactional role in mediating the relationship between the writers’ ideas and the target discourse community. The use of personal pronouns gives writers a voice and allows them to project their own stance in regard to the knowledge creation processes and their own contribution to that process. As Hyland and Tse (2004) confirm, “Engagement features, particularly imperatives and obligation modals which direct the reader to some thought or action, are important in bringing readers into their text as participants in an unfolding dialogue” (p. 173).

Other research into metadiscourse in doctoral dissertations has focused on using the Hyland (2005) model to investigate both cross cultural uses of metadiscourse and cross disciplinary use of this resource. For example, Can and Yuvayapan (2018) compared the use of metadiscourse in doctoral dissertations between native-speaking English writers and Turkish writers in English. They found that Turkish writers tended to underuse metadiscourse, with a particularly telling difference in the use of self-mentions in their respective texts. This suggests a difficulty with the effective construction of a discoursal self in English for these writers (see also Lee & Casal, 2014).

Though the Hyland (2005) model provides over 400 lexical and discourse items with which to compare different text corpora, Kuhi and Behnam (2011) argue that simply counting the lexical items across disciplines, in applying this model, is simply not enough to understand the significance of how and why metadiscourse is being deployed. They add a significant dimension to our analysis and understanding of metadiscourse, by presenting these textual features within their full social context and offer an insightful functional model with which to make sense of quantitative research findings. As they rightly suggest:

In this struggle, the ultimate product—text—carries with itself implicit and explicit traces of writers’ desires for promotion, identity, and power, readers’ desires for an elevated position and easier processing of the content, and publishers and academic institutions’ desire for promotion of symbolic and economic capital. (p. 131)

Their analysis of texts across the discipline of applied linguistics provides a sense for how institutional and social differences underlie metadiscourse use. This functional model, as detailed below, provides a useful tool for understanding the social contexts of metadiscourse use, and as such, is crucial to my purposes in this chapter.

Contextual Framework for Understanding Metadiscourse

In this section, I describe Kuhi and Behnam’s (2011) model in detail and illustrate their notions of a functional explanation of metadiscourse with examples from their corpus.

Accreditation of Academic Knowledge

According to Kuhi and Behnam (2011), metadiscourse plays an important role in the accreditation process of knowledge in the academy, starting with the research article (RA), or published journal article, in the manner in which it is used to affirm and support different claims. This is achieved, in terms of Hyland’s (2005) model, through intertextual features such as evidentials and hedging strategies where the possible damage through having claims disputed or proved incorrect, is limited. Hence, personal commitment to, and responsibility for, knowledge claims is downplayed in the RA in a way that it isn’t done by the time the knowledge reaches a much firmer acceptance, in a textbook of the field. This metadiscourse usage is an important aspect of research gaining a foothold, and then becoming accepted into the canon of knowledge within a given field.

Readers’ Processing Abilities

All research is written to be understood, accepted, and ultimately cited, as part of the established knowledge within a field, by the academic community. This process obviously starts with the review editors at the journal in question. Writers therefore need to maintain an awareness of their text in order to anticipate reader expectations and comprehension needs as the work unfolds. This is achieved by using interactive metadiscourse elements that aid comprehension such as code glosses, frame markers, logical connectors, and endophoric markers.

Power Relations in Academic Life

Writers of RAs have to maintain an important balance of power relations within an academic community, in order that their work will be acceptable to that group. Hedging strategies typically allow for deference to the wider community and evidentials provide what Kuhi and Behnam (2011) refer to as the “the projection of an insider ethos,” which involves addressing readers as if they were knowledgeable in the general area, familiar with the discipline’s forms of argument and ways of “establishing truth and possessing similar authority and influence.” (p.120). This balance between deference to the broader research community and the projection of an insider identity to project credibility rises from judicious use of the available interactive elements of a text.

Readers’ Attitudinal Vulnerability

This aspect of metadiscourse refers to conscious and deliberate attempts to manipulate the attitudes of the reader into a shared point of view. Appeals to shared knowledge and attitude markers as the evaluative elements of metadiscourse are indications of strategic investment of academic writers on the emotions and attitudes in persuading their readers. Kuhi and Behnam (2011) found high incidence of this strategy within textbooks, where the reader may not have a high level of specialized knowledge, and so this relative vulnerability is emphasized by these strategies.

Different Senses of Otherness

“Intertextuality” (e.g. Bakhtin, 2010) is an inherent quality of academic discourse and differs in important ways from one academic genre to another. In Kuhi and Behnam’s (2011) study, more prestigious academic genres such as the RA, had a higher ratio of explicit manifestation of evidentials and citations that place the writer’s claims into the context of previous research, to help persuade the elite audience that what is claimed should not be seen as being produced by an isolated writer, that the one who is writing is additionally a member of a discourse community. In this sense, the claims of the writer are seen as a logical response to an already established discourse and are therefore themselves open to subsequent responses.

Establishment of Writers’ Identity

Following Ivanič (1998), Kuhi and Behnam cite the following four areas for identity work within the discourse:

• Autobiographical self: the particular identity brought by the writing based on their life histories

• Discoursal self: what writers convey about themselves or the impression that is made through one’s writing

• Self as author: how a writer establishes authority in writing

• Possibilities for selfhood: those identities that are available within the sociocultural context of the writing (p. 124)

The uses of stance markers were equally present in the four corpora in Kuhi and Behnam’s (2011) study. Their function was to reflect the writer’s voice and protect their academic face and serve notice of attempts on the writer’s part to develop their discoursal self and self as author. It is suggested that in more prestigious texts, such as the RA, the authorial presence tends to be less explicit, which confirms the care that is required to negotiate the appropriate textual stance with particular kinds of reader.

Marketing Needs

In all academic disciplines, getting research funding, consultancy contracts, and students is an increasingly important and competitive aspect of the job. According to Kuhi and Behnam (2011) the competitive nature of this process “brings marketing norms closer to university discourses” (p. 127). This is most clearly evident in texts for commercial consumption, such as textbooks, but can also be seen in other genres with the use of stance markers as they position an author in regard to a body of knowledge and/or academic field.

Creation of Symbolic Capital

Whitley (2000, p. 25) suggests that much of modern academic writing is less about the creation of new knowledge and more about “. . . convincing fellow researchers of the importance and significance of the results and enhancing [their] own reputations.” The relatively higher status of boosters in prestigious academic genres found in Kuhi and Behnam’s (2011) corpus was indicative of a desire to establish a strong “self-image” among the discourse community of applied linguistics, for example.

While previous studies have contributed to the growing understanding of how metadiscourse use might vary according to genre (e.g., Hyland & Tse, 2004), there has been a tendency to look at the variations across genres that offer a contrast in terms of the communicative purposes they serve. This assumes that the genre classification for each discipline is uniform and stable and hides potential variation within academic subjects and individual genres such as the target text here, the postgraduate dissertation by existing works. The main objective of the present study, therefore, was to investigate how metadiscourse use varies according to the data used for the research and the changes to the authorial relation to that data, and then apply the contextual framework developed by Kuhi and Behnam (2011) to better understand factors that may be responsible for the possible variations. As Hyland (2005) suggests: “research is urgently needed to document changing thought styles, patterns of argument and ideological practices” (p. 202). Skulstad (2005) also has suggested that metadiscourse variation may be a feature of an emerging genre, where a greater need for guidance for the reader was seen as related to that newness of text form.

The following research questions therefore informed this preliminary study as I compare a multidisciplinary corpus of commentaries from Retrospective PhD by Publication works, with a general corpus of doctoral dissertations from within the same subjects:

• 1. Are there distinguishing differences in interactional metadiscourse use in these different types of dissertation texts?

• 2. If differences do exist, what functional reasons might explain them?

• 3. Are there any pedagogical or advisory implications from this analysis?

Methods

For this research, I created a mini corpus (Corpus A) of the commentaries that comprise a major part of the Retrospective PhD by Publication and, for comparison purposes, a second mini corpus (Corpus B) featuring more traditional monograph dissertation texts. The criteria for selection for both corpora were that texts should be written after the year 2000, and also needed to represent the same range of academic disciplines from across the academy, to allow for comparison. Two texts were chosen from each of the following disciplines for both corpora: Education, Performing Arts, Medicine/Health, Business Studies, and Engineering. These disciplines were chosen to provide a cross section of disciplines for comparison purposes, in line with previous studies where metadiscourse has been analysed across genre and text type (e.g. Hyland & Tse, 2004) The files were accessed through the EBSCO Open Dissertations Project, meaning they were free to access and download. The selected files were then matched, numbered and named (e.g. Education, 1 and Education Mono (graph), 1) for comparison and reference purposes within the study. The files were downloaded and converted into simple text files. At this stage, the files were cleaned of any extraneous information, such as the administrative details of the work, the final list of works cited, and other adornments to the central text that are not related to the actual written commentary or dissertation, such as tables of contents. The published texts that are discussed in the commentary pieces were also excluded. The two corpora then consisted of 180,158 words (Corpus A) and 666,720 words (Corpus B) respectively. The relatively small number of dissertations completed across a range of different disciplines by the Retrospective PhD by Publication route meant that this convenience sampling (Phillips & Egbert, 2017) was necessary and justified. There were only two texts found in the Engineering discipline, for example.

Corpus A and B were then both analysed using the AntConc (see Anthony, 2006) textual analysis software. The findings of this work are presented in Table 5.2. Once the raw data had been collected using Hyland’s (2005) model, significant work had to be done to ensure accuracy of the count, so that only lexical items that were functioning in the assigned manner within the texts were included. In this regard, for example, I observed the suggested distinction (Hyland & Tse, 2004; Kuhi & Behnam, 2011) between reference to inside and outside of the text. A couple of examples highlight the necessity for individual attention to each of the items:

• Example 1: That is, as shown in Fig. 5(a), denoted by white blocks, if a textural block is next to a structural one, along either horizontal or vertical direction, it is considered as necessary.

• Example 2: We next briefly discuss representation of numbers in a finite field.

In the first example, the lexical item next clearly functions to describe a feature of the blocks under consideration that is outside of the research document, and as such is not an example of metadiscourse and would be discounted. In the second example, by contrast, the reference from the use of next is internal, referring to a different part of the text itself. This second example would therefore count as an example of a frame marker. The words identified by the ANTCONC analysis software were therefore manually checked by the author before assignment to metadiscourse sub-categories. In cases where the counts produced thousands of instances of high frequency devices, such as some modals and conjunctions, following Hyland and Tse (2004) and Hyland (2005), a hundred sentences containing each individual lexical item were randomly generated from the corpus. A final figure was calculated as a proportion of the sample size multiplied by the total number of words.

Table 5.2 Comparative metadiscourse analysis using Hyland and Tse’s (2004) model

Results

Two separate chi-square tests of independence were conducted, one on each dimension of the model. For the interactive dimension, the results were χ² (4, N = 22,279) = 34.8, p < .001. For the interactive dimension, they were χ² (4, N = 26,035) = 626.5, p < .001. Thus, even after a Bonferroni adjustment to control for the two separate tests, the differences between the texts in the two corpora are clearly significant on both dimensions.

To determine the exact sources of these differences, chi-square tests of goodness of fit were used to make pairwise comparisons across corpora in each category within each dimension. The Bonferroni-adjusted results for the interactive dimension showed statistically significant differences only among endophoric references (χ² (1) = 7.22, p = .04) and code glosses (χ² (1) = 15.61, p < .001), the former being less prevalent among the texts of the Retrospective PhD by Publication corpus and the latter being more.

Similarly adjusted results for the interactional dimension showed statistically significant differences in every category, instances of which were proportionally less frequent in the texts of the Retrospective PhD by Publication corpus in every case except self-mentions, where the opposite was true: hedges (χ² (1) = 56.89, p = .04), boosters (χ² (1) = 26.71, p < .001), attitude markers (χ² (1) = 16.63, p < .001), engagement (χ² (1) = 80.93, p < .001), self-mentions (χ² (1) = 445.33, p < .001). These calculations were then applied to the adjusted findings, expressed per 10,000 words (following e.g. Hyland & Tse, 2004; Hyland, 2005), from the corpus analysis presented in Table 5.2. The numbers revealing a significant difference following the chi-square analysis are highlighted with an asterisk.

In summary, there are numerical differences across each section of the model, for both interactive and interactional categories. These differences are most striking for the categories of endophoric reference (interactional), and self-mentions, and engagement markers (interactive). In all but one of the categories, self-mentions, the writers of the Retrospective PhD by Publication are using either less, or significantly less, metadiscourse than the writers of the more traditional monograph thesis. In the next section, I will analyse the most significant differences further, and try to account for them in terms of the rhetorical task of writing a Retrospective PhD by Publication.

Functional Analysis of the Findings

Self-Mentions

The most obvious and significant difference in the two corpora was in the use of self-mentions. This relatively high use of authorial self-mention in the Retrospective PhD by Publication commentaries is also perhaps, given the nature of these texts, the most predictable and expected outcome from the research finding here. In the present study, we find that the Corpus A authors are using a significant amount (129.8 vs 73.4 per 10,000 words) of self-mention when compared to the writers from the monograph corpus, with the use of the first person singular I, particularly evident (58.7 per 10,000 words) Self-mentions, along with code glosses, attitude markers, hedges and boosters, are implicated in the creation of a textual voice or authorial personality (Kuhi & Behnam, 2011). In the applied linguistics corpus utilized in the Kuhi and Behnam (2011), self-mentions were seen as functioning to close down alternative viewpoints, anticipate and ameliorate possible consequences or questions about the findings or for being proved wrong, indicate authors’ affective and emotional attitude, and generally projected the authors into the text and highlighted how they felt about and stood in relation to their ideas and work. Analysis in Corpus A here, finds similar functions:

• (a) Close down alternative readings:

  I do not see both approaches to research as on a spectrum. I see them as different. (Education 1)

• (b) Anticipate consequences or questions:

  But where are play and learning situated, and where do I situate myself within them? (Education 2)

• (c) Express ownership of the paper’s organization and work:

  This was the contribution I set out to make, firstly across my own programme and school… (Business 2)

• (d) Project authorial voice into the text:

  Instead, I sought to explore relational and action-based researchers to location… (Performing Arts 1)

What we also see in Corpus A is a good deal of self-reflection, and therefore self-mention, from the authors on the very process of writing and synthesizing their own work. The following examples demonstrate this notion:

• Works 1–4 had a degree of triangulation where two types of data were collected which complemented each other, thereby reinforcing my conclusions. (Health/Medicine 1)

• I wanted to build on these, using them as the basis for developing new knowledge and understanding. (Business 2)

• Here, I was hoping to collect descriptive data about student engagement with feedback… (Education, 1)

A further feature is the strong sense of personal narrative, of the process of becoming an academic and PhD holder that is present within each of the featured texts:

• In 1983, I transferred back to the Mechanical School from Civil Engineering. I then started to teach Dynamics and Control… (Engineering, 1)

• For my part, I had obtained an MSC (Econ) by research in management and industrial relations…where I received training in research methodology and statistics. (Business, 1)

• So I wanted to explore whether taking a different view of entrepreneurship would engage more staff… (Business, 2)

Looking again through the sample texts in Corpus A, this self-reference and self-reflection is perhaps the most striking aspect of the discourse and reflects the central rhetorical task, that of synthesizing and contextualising one’s own work, that defines the Retrospective PhD by Publication.

Endophoric Reference

A significant difference in metadiscourse use was also seen in the relatively sparing use of endophoric reference in Corpus A (14.0 vs 24.8 per 10,000 words). The function of this discoursal dimension in formal academic text is to refer to other parts of the text, and by doing so manage the comprehension of the reader. The differences in the amount of such reference are readily explained by the relative size of the texts that comprise both corpora. Simply put, the monographs are much longer texts than the commentaries (with a mean size of approx. 66,000 vs 18,000) and the writer is therefore required to do much more work to keep the reader both interested and following the narrative thread that runs throughout the text. If you have a relatively short text, then this task is less important. The following textual examples from corpus B highlight this:

• As mentioned earlier, much of the process position is reliant on whether opportunities are discovered or created. (Business, Mono, 2)

• This is described below along with specific developments throughout the decade in the related areas of WHO activities… (Medicine/Health, Mono, 2)

• As explained above, Arnheim talks about emergence and perceptual forces in the perception of pictorial objects… (Performing Arts, Mono, 1)

Engagement Markers

The third functional category of metadiscourse that shows the strongest difference, with less usage in Corpus A, is that of engagement markers. This is perhaps the most difficult difference to explain. Engagement markers (reader pronouns, directives, questions, appeals to shared knowledge, and personal asides) are how writers relate to their readers with respect to rhetorical positions advanced in the text. Readers are guided towards certain interpretations and conclusions and otherwise have their attention focused by the writer. The writers of the Retrospective PhD by Publication commentaries are using significantly less of this as a rhetorical strategy. Interestingly, in the Kuhi and Behnam (2011) study, the text type with the least use of engagement markers was the RA, when compared to such texts as the introductory textbook. This was accounted for by the suggestion that the reader of the RA is unlikely to be a novice reader and is one who shares many of the underlying assumptions that comprise the knowledge and understanding of the field. The RA serves as a place where new ideas are put forward and are often still contested or require further research to qualify and clarify the claims that are being made. In the case of the Prospective PhD commentaries, there is a sense that the reduced use of engagement markers highlights the insider status of the authors, writing from within their own field. There is less requirement to guide the conclusions of the reader since the work described has already been published and to some degree ratified by the academy. A monograph dissertation, however, is a text where new data and findings are been placed within a niche of current understanding and knowledge. The author of this kind of text is arguing for the relevance and position of their own work, marking an entry into their field.

In general, then, the results in Table 5.2 suggest that Retrospective PhD commentary texts use less of the metadiscourse that is used to galvanize support, express collegiality, resolve difficulties, and avoid disputation. This work is usually done through hedging, boosting and deployment of attitude markers. Such discourse, according to Kuhi and Behnam’s (2011) model, “reflect a writer’s desire to anticipate the possible negative consequences of being proved wrong by limiting commitment to claims and enable writers to refer to speculative possibilities while alluding to personal doubt, thereby avoiding personal responsibility for statement and limiting the damage that may result from categorical commitments” (p. 118). In this case, I believe that the relatively spare use of these discourse devices in the Prospective PhD by Publication reflect the confidence and authority of writers who have already established themselves as writers and members of their field. In analysing and making sense of one’s own work, there can be no greater authority than one’s self. There is therefore less need to hedge analysis and inject attitude towards the propositional meaning that is being conveyed in the commentary. The writers appear to feel less compelled to “project insider status” (Kuhi & Behnam, 2011), as mentioned above, and appear instead to be writing as insiders.

Hybrid Discourse in Post-graduate Writing

Variation across the genre in the ways in which authors interact with their readership within the text is suggestive of an emerging genre (Skulstad, 2005). As Kuhi and Behnam (2011) have reminded us, “Writer–reader interaction is a social practice in which communicative goals, interests, benefits, advantages, and desires of all stakeholders of academic communication play influential roles” (p. 130). The specific findings in the analysis shows that in three ways, use of self-mentions, endophoric reference, and engagement markers, there is a significant difference between how post-graduate writers are engaging with their readers when describing already published works. In answer to the third research question, related to a pedagogical perspective, then, I suggest that it may be worth highlighting these aspects of metadiscourse and investigating with writers who are starting out on the Prospective PhD by Publication process, the ways in which these different textual features function. Analysis of the functional usage of metadiscourse can help show us 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. As Hyland (2005) points out, understanding metadiscourse, allows writers to successfully, “engage in a community appropriate dialogue with readers” (p.175). A writer confronted with the task of analysing their own work may feel intimidated or hesitant about developing a strong and clear authorial voice, through the use of self-mentions, given that the use of personal pronouns, for example, is often an area where conflicting views are offered in English for Academic Purposes pedagogy and the advice for academic writing genre (Sword, 2012). Understanding that this is an established practice in attempting this rhetorical task may be beneficial and reassuring in that regard.

Conclusion

Metadiscourse illustrates how authorial choices reflect the different purposes of writers, differing expectations they make about their audiences, and different kinds of author-reader interactions. The metadiscourse practices we find in the writing of post-graduate authors here can be seen as developments in academic culture and evidence of variation in publishing that show, perhaps, a loosening of norms and increasing openness to a plurality of discourses. Considering the rhetorical question posed by the title of this chapter, there is strong evidence that writers of the Prospective PhD by Publication commentaries are using metadiscourse differently to position themselves in regard to their reader and their field. The interactional dimension of metadiscourse was used significantly less in each of the categories, apart from self-mentions where the biggest difference overall was recorded in an increase of comparative usage. The current study helps further reveal “the interactions which underlie all communication and help us see how discourses are community–specific, historically situated cultural products” (Hyland, 2005, p. 203). Caution must be exercised when considering these findings, of course, since both corpora were based on a relatively small sample size. Further investigation for each aspect of metadiscourse using a much larger collection of texts will be necessary to tease out the intricacies of how authors manage and construct their own identities as writers, and members of an academic community, while engaged with this task. As the Retrospective PhD by Publication route continues to grow in different contexts, it will be important to track development of how this community-specific product continues to develop, and what further variance may yet emerge.

• Takeaway for PhD by Publication supervisors:

  In addition to difference in structure (see Chap. 4), PhD by Publication thesis is an emergent, distinctive academic writing sub-genre partly because of the distinctive use of metadiscourse, which refers to the way writers interact with their readers using language. It may be worthwhile to highlight the need for a strong authorial presence to candidates who otherwise may feel uncomfortable with inserting themselves into an academic text, through personal pronoun use, for example.

• Takeaway for PhD by Publication candidates:

  The academic language used in writing a PhD by Publication thesis can be quite different from that in a traditional PhD thesis. Thus, some of the academic language you acquired from your writing experiences and learned from English for Academic Purposes courses may not apply. It is important to read up on PhD by Publication theses, preferably in the same discipline, to get familiar with how writer identity is constructed through language. Developing a strong and clear ownership of your own work is an important part of making sense of that work in the PhD by Publication synthesis.

Appendices

Corpus A: Retrospective PhD by Publication

• Education

  • 1. Moseley, A. (2018). Learning at the Edge of the Magic Circle: A Case for Playful Learning.

  • 2. Peacock, S. (2015). A constructive, conceptual analytical review of the Community of Inquiry Framework.

• Performing Arts

  • 1. Ames, M. (2017). Alternative Aesthetic Encounters: Creating Dance-theatre Performance with Artists with Learning or Intellectual Disabilities: Seven Published Works.

  • 2. Brookes, M. J. (2015). On a clear day you can see for ever: mediation as form and dramaturgy in located performance.

• Medicine/Health

  • 1. Choudhury, B. (2017). The Anatomical Student Experience.

  • 2. Pritchard, S. E. (2015). Establishing volumetric biomarkers in MRI of the digestive tract.

• Engineering

  • 1. Steer, J. M. (2016). Research into material recovery techniques and the utilisation of solid fuels in an industrial context.

  • 2. White, A. S. (2000). Mechatronics of systems with undetermined configurations.

• Business Studies

  • 1. Jenkins, G. (2000). The rise of human resource management: responsibility and reward.

  • 2. Ure, J. P. (2013). Aligning people, processes and technology: recurring issues in the design and implementation of eLearning, eHealth and eBusiness infrastructure.

Corpus B: PhD by Monograph (Mono)

• Education

  • 1. Graham, K. (2020). Career and technical education teachers’ beliefs about developing students’ motivation to write.

  • 2. Johnson, W. G. (2020). Education research using data mining and machine learning with Computer Science undergraduates.

• Performing Arts

  • 1. Álvarez, L. P. (2019). Experiencing Emotional Import in Twenty-first Century Euro-American Contemporary Theatre Dance.

  • 2. Clair, K. (2012). The Art of Resistance: Trauma, Gender, and Traditional Performance in Acehnese Communities, 1976–2011.

• Medicine Health

  • 1. Foran, B. J. (2007). Medical pluralism and global health policy: the integration of traditional medicine in health care systems.

  • 2. Kumar, A. (2007). The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as lived by individuals living with chronic illnesses.

• Engineering

  • 1. Rematska, G. (2018). A Stochastic Petri Net Reverse Engineering Methodology for Deep Understanding of Technical Documents.

  • 2. Thomas, J. (2018). Analysis of particle and cluster characterization methods used in aerosol science.

• Business Studies

  • 1. Heywood, D. C. (2012). An in-depth study of entrepreneurs and PhD students’ practical processes and self-identities: Are they really two different species?

  • 2. Larson, B. (2016). From Personal Trust to Professional Behavior: A Study of the Impact of Trust and Enjoyment on Behavior Intentions in Business Analytics.