PRUDENCE, PRECISION, AND POLITENESS: HEDGES IN ACADEMIC WRITING

Abstract

Academic knowledge is now generally recognised to be a social accomplishment, the outcome of a cultural activity shaped by ideology and constituted by agreement between a writer and a potentially skeptical discourse community.A substantial literature has shown that the research paper is a rhetorically sophisticated artifact which displays a careful balance of factual information and social interaction (eg.Bazerman, 1988;Swales, 1990).Academic writers do not only need to make the results of their research public, but also persuasive, and their success in gaining acceptance for their work at least partly depends on manipulating various rhetorical and interactive features.The linguistic resources used to achieve these interpersonal goals have been variously described under the headings of evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000), appraisal (Martin, 2000), stance (Hyland, 1999a) and metadiscourse (Crismore, 1989), and one of the key elements examined for their contribution to the negotiation of a successful writer-reader relationship are hedges.Hedges are the means by which we express tentativeness and possibility, and they are crucial to academic writing where statements are rarely made without subjective assessments of their reliability.As these examples taken from research articles suggest, hedges are a significant resource for anticipating a reader's possible rejection of a proposition and for presenting claims with precision and caution:

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