Activity and Evaluation: Reporting practices in academic writing

Abstract

Reference to prior research is almost a defining feature of the academic research article. Even the most original paper integrates and represents ideas, concepts, findings, and theories from o ther sources and, indeed, would be unlikely to reach publication if it did not. Specifically, such reporting re­ presents in a new situation the way language was used in a previous context,, and is defined for my purposes here as the attribution of propositional conten t to another source. Its im portance in academic discourse lies in pro­ viding an appropriate context of persuasion, dem onstrating how the curren t work builds on and reworks past utterances to establish intertextual links to the wider discipline. Put simply, academic writing depends for its success on situating curren t work in a larger disciplinary narrative (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Hyland, 2000; Myers, 1990). W ithout such links academics could neither justify their argum ents by connecting their research activities to significant work in the field, nor use this disciplinary knowledge to estab­ lish the novelty of their position (Gilbert, 1976; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995).

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