Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com
ENGLISH FOR
SPECIFIC
English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 PURPOSES
www.elsevier.com/locate/esp

‘Small bits of textual material’: A discourse

analysis of Swales’ writing
Ken Hyland *

School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education, University of London,

20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, UK

Abstract

Despite his considerable influence on the development of ESP and all our professional lives,
almost nothing has been written about John Swales’ distinctive prose style. Based on a 340,000 word
corpus comprising 14 single-authored papers and most chapters from his three main books, this
paper sets out to identify the main features of this style. Using frequency, keyword and concordance
analyses, I compare the Swales’ corpus with a broader applied linguistics corpus of 710,000 words
and identify self mention, hedging and attitude, reader engagement and considerateness as charac-
teristic of Swalesian rhetoric. I conclude with the view that this is a disciplinary voice informed
by a keen assessment of his readers and representing an independent creativity shaped by an
accountability to shared practices.
Ó 2006 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘‘By the late 1970s, I was also coming to the conclusion that I had some small talent
for taking unlikely, small bits of textual material of a kind many might assume to be
pretty trivial, and turning them into rather more substantive accounts than col-
leagues might have anticipated.’’ (Swales, 1998, p. 179)
John Swales has been the single most influential figure in the emergence of ESP as a
force in English language teaching. He has reinvented himself several times over the past
35 years, keeping one step ahead of both the field and his critics in an environment which

*
Tel.: +44 20 7612 6789; fax: +44 20 7612 6534.
E-mail address: k.hyland@ioe.ac.uk.

0889-4906/$34.00 Ó 2006 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.esp.2006.10.005
144 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

has not always been hospitable to his innovative approaches to language description and
pedagogy. Almost single-handedly at first, he carved a distinct space for ESP by insisting
that language use is always related to social contexts and that practice should always be
firmly grounded in theory. These ideas often struggled in a world where prevailing fash-
ions focused on an idealized linguistic competence and psycholinguistic notions of acqui-
sition and learning. The fact that the concepts of genre, discourse analysis, textography,
community and consciousness raising have now established themselves, and in many cases
supplanted these earlier ideas, is testament to Johns’ defining influence on the field. But
while some considerable effort has been spent in extending, elaborating or challenging
Swales’ ideas, less has been said on his writing style and the language he has employed
to construct his ideas and reputation.
In this paper I squeeze into this, admittedly very narrow, research gap to explore how
John uses language to position himself, present his ideas and interact with his readers. Such
acts of self-representation are sometimes referred to as voice, stance or persona, but unlike
some treatments in rhetorical and literary-critical theory, I do not see this as just an indi-
vidual expression of authoritativeness or authorial presence. On the contrary, all writing
contains ‘voice’ as it is this which situates us culturally and historically and allows us to
locate ourselves in our communities through the linguistic resources our disciplines make
available. But as John’s writing reveals, these culturally recognisable forms do not produce
a conformity to rigid prescription but represent boundaries broad enough to allow even the
most individual, even eccentric, individuals to engage their colleagues effectively.
Using techniques from corpus linguistics and a predilection for the features of interac-
tion in texts, I interrogate a 340,000 word corpus of John’s published writing to character-
ise something of the Swales’ style and his use of language to establish himself and his
views. In particular, I focus on what appears to be the central features of this corpus as
revealed through frequency, keyword and concordance analysis: that is, a highly personal,
modest and interactive style. To begin with I look at some of his preferred terms and make
comparisons with a larger applied linguistic corpus to see what distinguishes his work
from the herd, but first, a few words about the corpora.

1. Corpora and methods

The ‘Swales corpus’ (Appendix) was compiled at the English Language Institute (ELI)
from John’s collection of work. It consists of 14 single-authored papers and most chapters
from his three main books: Genre Analysis (1990), Other Floors, Other Voices (1998) and
Research Genres (2004). It therefore represents 15 years of Swales’ research output in var-
ious forms and comprises 342,500 words in all. My intention is to identify some of the dis-
tinctive features of this work by comparing it with a broader applied linguistics corpus
using frequency, keyword and concordance analyses. The reference corpus represents a
spectrum of current work in the area and mirrors the genres of the Swales collection, com-
prising 66 research articles from 15 leading international journals and 25 chapters from 12
books totalling 710,000 words.
The text processing for this research was done with Wordsmith Tools 4 (Scott, 1998).
The first step was to generate word lists of single words, and three-, four- and five-word
strings for the two corpora, narrowing the set of expressions by applying notions of struc-
tural and idiomatic coherence. This meant that only word clusters which constituted com-
plete syntactic units or which intuitively seemed like idiomatically independent expressions
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 145

were included. Examples of syntactically complete units include prepositional phrases (at
the outset, in the context of), noun phrases (an interesting concept, the last ten years), verb
phrases (to confirm our, consider this example) while sentence stems are phrases such as: I
think that, it is well known that and we suspect.
I then compared each list in the Swales corpus with those from the reference corpus
using the KeyWords tool. This program identifies words and phrases that occur signifi-
cantly more frequently in the smaller corpus than the larger using a log-likelihood statistic
to determine whether the frequency difference is statistically significant (at a 0.000001 sig-
nificance level). This offers a better characterisation of the differences between two corpora
than a simple comparison of ranked frequency lists as it identifies items which are ‘‘key’’
differentiators across many files, rather than being dominated by the most common words
in each corpus. In this way, I could identify which words best distinguish the texts in the
Swales corpus from those in applied linguistics more generally. After reviewing the key-
word lists and identifying individual words and multi-word clusters, I then explored the
more frequent items through concordancing. This allowed me to group common devices
into broad functional and pragmatic categories which seemed to capture central aspects
of Swales’ writing.

2. Frequency and keyword features: genre, dissertation and herbarium?

A simple frequency count of content words throws up items which might lead us to
identify John in a ‘name-the-linguist’ parlour game. The top eight content items are:
research, genre(s), English, discourse, language, academic, writing and students. All these
items occur over 500 times and, like texts, community and rhetorical which appear a little
further down the list with over 300 occurrences, appear in 90% or more of the 50 files that
make up the corpus. This is perhaps not surprising as they represent the key themes of
Swales work and serve as motifs for his contribution to the field, as do several of the most
common n-grams, or multi word clusters, which include non-native speakers of English, the
concept of discourse community, a genre based approach and English as a second language.
A Keywords list generated by comparison with the reference corpus, as shown in
Table 1, offers a more accurate indicator of the words and clusters which best distinguish
Swales’ writing as these are items which occur significantly more often than chance
(p < 0.00000001).

Table 1
Keywords in the Swales corpus
singles 3-grams 4-grams 5-grams
Genre(s) Would seem to the University of Michigan Non-native Speakers of English
dissertation In terms of English for Specific Purposes The concept of discourse community
Herbarium Various kinds of As might be expected As might be expected the
I The research world As far as I The second half of the
Michigan The English language I have tried to As far as I am
Have The fact that The North University Building At the time of writing
Species At this juncture A genre-based approach I have been able to
My In the herbarium Turns out to be The role of English in
Specimens The Testing Division Over the last decade As far as I am aware
ELI The research article Have been able to As far as I can
146 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

At the top of the single words list are genre, dissertation and herbarium, items which
form the core of the three monographs in the corpus. The latter of these, like species
and specimen which also figure in the top ten keywords, appears because of its location
on the second floor of the North University Building at Michigan. It was here that
Swales not only spent much of his working life, but also where he haunted the
corridors closely and sympathetically observing the lives and texts of its inhabitants
for Other Floors, Other Voices, a surprisingly under-rated book which perhaps drew
more critical than popular acclaim. Here again, the University of Michigan, non-native
speakers of English and the North University Building are the main key phrases in the
corpus.
More interestingly, the keywords programme reveals significant uses of non-content
words and phrases, which move us away from Swales’ professional interests to indicate
something of the pragmatic and discoursal features of his work. In particular, if we look
at the individual keywords and coherent n-grams, or recurrent sequences of more than one
word, we see that they cluster around four broad areas which we can characterise as (i)
hedges and mitigation markers, (ii) attitudinal lexis, (iii) reader engagement, and (iv) met-
adiscourse signals. The starting place for this analysis, however, is the extraordinary use of
self mention.

2.1. The personal in the rhetorical: self mention and reflection

John’s frequent use of the first person is perhaps the most striking feature of the key-
words list, with both I and my occurring in the top ten. Self-referential I, me and my occur
9.1 times per 1000 words in the Swales corpus compared with 5.2 per 1000 words in the
applied linguistics reference corpus and 1.4 per 1000 words in a more general academic
corpus of 240 research articles (Hyland, 2001). This marked preference for explicit autho-
rial intrusion helps to explain the very strong sense of personal investment we get from
John’s writing. This is not the faceless discourse which academic prose is often caricatured
to be, but a style of writing infused with the subjectivity of a writer making decisions,
weighing evidence and drawing conclusions, as can be seen from a few examples (dates
refer to papers in the corpus list in the Appendix):

(1) Like many ESP practitioners today, I believe that knowledge of any genre is best
viewed as a crucial strategic resource. (1998b)
(2) I feel fairly confident in claiming that Herbarium curators form a distinctive commu-
nity. (1998a)
I suggest that a large part of the way forward in this pragmatic approach is to take
the view that theory and methodology represent not so much separate epistemolog-
ical worlds, but function more as mirror images of the same enterprise-that of mak-
ing useful discoveries. (2004a)

A real human voice is integral to John’s style of argument: here is an actual, account-
able source and not simply an anonymous animator. The personal conviction expressed in
these claims both engages the reader in the argument and acts a strong persuasive force,
investing his rhetoric with the personal and experiential, often by drawing on his own
teaching practices:
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 147

(2) My students come from every conceivable department, but I try to make them a
socio-rhetorical community, a support group for each other. I do a lot of rhetorical
consciousness raising and audience analysis. . .. I take them behind the scenes into the
hidden world of recommendations, applications and evaluations.. . . In actual fact, I
am much less sure than I used to be that I am a language teacher. I have come to
believe that my classes are, in the end, exercises in academic socialization. (1994)

We also get a sense of John thinking through issues and a clear impression of why they
matter. This is perhaps most obvious in his traipsing between departments to understand
the different community practices in Other Floors, Other Voices, but it also comes through
strongly in the kinds of reflections he shares with his readers in all his work, as in this
admission from English as Tyrannosaurus rex (1997, p. 377):

(3) So I have belatedly come to recognize a certain self-deception in 30-year involvement

with academic and scientific English. Certainly in Libya in the 1960s and in the
Sudan in the 1970s I accepted the widely-held position which argued that what Third
World countries needed was a rapid acceleration in their resources of human capital,
which could be achieved by a hurried transmission of western technical and scientific
know-how delivered through the medium of English and supported by appropriate
English language programs. I also believed that working overseas in scientific Eng-
lish, as researcher, materials writer and teacher, was, in essence, a culturally and
politically neutral enterprise. In doing so, I conveniently overlooked the links
between the teaching of technical languages and the manufacture and export of tech-
nical equipment. So, when I read, say, Phillipson’s counter-culture account of how
British ESL created an academic and commercial base for itself, I find myself caught
up in some serious reflection.

Clearly there is both real assurance and confident ease in this writing which perhaps
comes with experience. I haven’t been able to study diachronic changes in this corpus,
but it is widely believed that the options open to established researchers are probably
much wider than those available to beginning ones; a phenomenon John has referred to
as ‘‘Young Turk’’ versus ‘‘Old Fart’’ approaches (Swales 2002). This kind of reflexivity
contributes to the construction of a very particular ‘voice’ or rhetorical personality, a
feature which has been called stance (Biber and Finegan, 1989; Hyland, 2005). A key
aspect of the Swalesian stance is frequency with which explicit self-mention is used
in a self-deprecatory way. John himself claims this is for self-protection: a concern with
being found to be wrong about things (Swales, pc). I see method here, however as John
is unusual in revealing the often unacknowledged uncertainties and failures which pla-
gue research. Rather than airbrushing these, he almost celebrates them, perhaps pro-
moting another Swales’ agenda: that of encouraging novice researchers and teachers
by admitting that even the field’s most illustrious figures have their doubts and
setbacks:

(4) When I started this project I kept on coming across adjectives that I felt I ought
to have known, but somehow I didn’t quite manage to resurrect their meanings (and
I suspect that I am not alone in this kind of annoying discovery). (1998a)
148 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

But I am very unsure whether I will ever use these particular materials again. As mat-
ters stand at the moment, these materials have been, I believe, an educational
failure. (2001b)

Indeed, despite some trying, I have so far been unable to repeat my earlier success.
Perhaps in the same way that composers only seem able to write one violin concerto,
discourse analysts can produce only one successful model. (2002b)
More generally, a concordance of the first person in the Swales’ corpus shows the extent
to which agency is explicitly associated with modality and mitigation. The most frequent
main verbs related to I are think (86), believe (71), suspect (35), hope (33) tried, (31) and
guess (29), all of which reflect his care and circumspection in handling claims and data.
Clearly these patterns occur frequently enough to represent conscious choices in self rep-
resentation, suggesting that John believes the researcher should be visible in the text. We
find similar uses when extending the collocates to the most common clusters (Table 2).

2.2. Interactional preferences: hedging and attitude

Part of this personal involvement involves a prudent approach to textual data and a
respect for the potentially opposing views of readers. John’s texts are copiously annotated
with commentary on the possible accuracy of claims, the extent of his commitment to
them and his stance towards them. Essentially, Swales does this in two main ways: through
hedging and the expression of attitude.
The use of language to express caution and commitment is a key feature of academic
writing and much has been written on the topic of hedging and boosting as communi-
cative strategies for conveying reliability and strategically manipulating commitment for
interpersonal reasons. Writers represent themselves and their work in different ways and
this is partly influenced by discipline, by experience, by personality and by the material
they are working with. Writers must calculate what weight to give an assertion, mark-
ing the extent they regard it as reliable and perhaps claiming protection in the event
that it turns out to be wrong (Hyland, 1998). Hedges therefore imply that a statement
is based on plausible reasoning rather than certain knowledge, indicating the degree of
confidence it is prudent to attribute to it. Swales employs hedges and mitigation
throughout his work, opening a discursive space which invites readers into a dialogue
where they can consider and dispute his interpretations. As these examples suggest,
his arguments often seek to accommodate his reader’s expectations that their views will
be acknowledged in the discourse:

(5) Such observations suggest to me that looking for ‘‘a one size fits all’’ concept of
genre, searching for a single best kind of genre theory—and one doubtless that is
complex, subtle and fully nuanced—is probably misguided. (2002a)

I was, I suspect, rather too easily seduced by the concept of discourse community.
Perhaps all too willingly I made common cause with all those who have their own
agendas for viewing discourse communities as real, stable groups of consensus hold-
ers. (1998a)
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 149

Overall, there would seem to be some evidence that children acquire some genre-
skills quite early. . .. (1990)
By marking statements as provisional in this way, John is able to both convey his views
and involve readers in their ratification, conveying respect for colleagues and their posi-
tions. The extent of this tendency towards rhetorical modesty can be seen from the list
of hedging expressions which occur in the top 500 keywords in the corpus shown in Table
3, all of which are statistically highly significant.
Despite this emphasis on negotiation and reader awareness, Swales is no wilting vio-
let. He has always listened to his critics and revisited several of his more well-known
arguments, notably those on the move structure of introductions, on the nature of com-
munity, on purpose in defining genre, and on English on the world stage. His work,
however, could never have been so influential if it was nothing more than a series of
self-effacing invitations for us to consider possibilities. He is also able to present claims
with unambiguous robustness:

(6) Certainly, any kind of descriptive approach to communication is a badly needed

input into HRD as it is currently practised and understood. (1994)

The key point I want to make here is that when matters do not go smoothly, we can
find opportunities within encounters for conversation management. (1993)

Some shift in the reading research area towards a genre perspective would seem
highly desirable. (1990)

. . .any vision we may have of the scientist-researcher working away in the lab or in
the field and then retiring to a quiet place to type up quickly the experimental report
according to some stereotyped format is decidedly at odds with reality. (1990)

Table 2
Most frequent collocates of ‘I’ in the Swales’ corpus
I have * tried to 30 As far as I am aware/know 16
I believe (in parenthesis) 30 As far as I can tell/see/discover 13
I would like to 28 I would argue 10
I (would) suggest 22 I have attempted to 8

Table 3
hedging expressions in the corpus (p < 0.00000001)
Perhaps It would seem I have tried to
Would As it happens Been able to show
Seem At least in As might be expected
Largely At first sight Would seem to be
Partly We might expect As far as I am /can
Typically Have been able Turn(s) out to be
Might And the like A fair amount of
Occasional It turns out that
Suspect At the time of writing
Somehow
Guess
150 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

But Swales never demonstrates, proves or establishes, and only rarely finds or shows.
Instead, his categorical assertions are more usually accompanied by an evaluative com-
ment to convey the strength of a conviction.
Instances of ascribed ‘attitude’ in academic texts usually concern writers’ judgements of
epistemic probability and estimations of value, with affective meanings generally less
prominent (Hyland, 2000). In Martin’s (2000) terms attitudes lean towards appreciation,
or ethical evaluation, rather than affect, which expresses feelings, or judgement, concerning
moral estimations. In the Swales corpus, important, complex, useful and interesting all have
high frequencies, but the items which most distinguish his work from the larger reference
corpus are shown in Table 4.
In this list we see a range of items which can function to convey an appreciation of
social or semiotic phenomena. These are generally positive attributes and are often used
to generously evaluate the research or working practices of others, as in these examples:

(7) Certainly, I find it remarkable that even as proficient a non-native user as Yao
should have introduced such an unexpected, subtle and self-evaluative question
about her writing into the discussion. (2001b)

I see English for Academic Purposes as an established ESL specialisation of proven

worth, resourced by dedicated career professionals of considerable technical compe-
tence. . . (1994)

For this, I will use Anne Beaufort’s excellent but insufficiently known 1998 volume
entitled ‘Writing in the Real World’. (2002b)

..from Hyland’s (2000) rich account of disciplinary discourse in eight fields. (2004a)
Equally, however, Swales uses these markers of attitude to stress strongly felt commit-
ments to a particular viewpoint, typically concerning text features or research results, as in
these cases:

(8) One of the surprising features of Huddleston’s corpus is the rarity of the -ing
complementizer. . . (2004c)

Some of the most dramatic findings are the self-reports elicited by Jernudd & Bal-
dauf, (1987) from Scandinavian psychologists. (2004c)

Some shift in the reading research area towards a genre perspective would seem
highly desirable. (1990)

Certainly, accumulations of such incidental findings provide little in the way of a

platform from which to launch corpus-based pedagogical enterprises (2001b)
As can be seen from several of these examples, Swales uses boosters to graduate his
expression of attitude (most, highly), what Martin (2000) refers to as ‘turning up the vol-
ume’ in order to emphasize the force of his convictions.
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 151

Table 4
Keywords expressing attitude (p < 0.0000001)
scholarly new standard
technical impressive extensive
literary interesting hard
contemporary unusual strong
rich original useful
intellectual exceptional complex
best excellent uncommon
highly valuable relevant

Through these acts of personal involvement and professional investment we are invited
to share his understandings and subscribe to his take on the ways that both people and
language behave. This is not to say that Swales’ arguments are never anything but fully
researched and amply supported by empirical evidence and careful logic. But this is not
all there is to it. By scattering expressions of attitude through his texts Swales creates
for himself a distinctive discoursal style and adds another rhetorical string to his bow.
He shows what he thinks about matters and not just what the data tells us; he aligns him-
self with a viewpoint in a very personal way and sucks us into the argument through the
force of his commitments so that we get a sense of participating in an unfolding explora-
tion of the issues.

2.3. Reader engagement

In addition to a clear, and very personal, authorial stance expressed through reflec-
tion, self mention, hedging and attitude markers, we have also seen that Swales works
hard to engage readers with his ideas through his writing. Successful interactions not
only involve a writer’s projection of a competent and appropriately authoritative stance,
but must also recognise and respond to the potential objections, misunderstandings and
processing difficulties of readers. In this regard, Swales always treats his audience with
respect and consideration. He weaves his texts as a kind of collusive web to construct
a professional context in which we are always seen as intelligent colleagues sensible
enough to follow what he has to say. As I noted earlier, his arguments and claims
are often softened to represent an open-minded persona and to accommodate readers,
but he frequently goes further to meet our expectations of inclusion and anticipate
our questions and perspectives, drawing us into a shared experience of some interesting
finding or puzzling data.
One aspect of this, and a relatively unusual one in my experience of studying aca-
demic prose, is a slightly quaint and dated reference to ‘the reader’. There are 16 men-
tions of the reader in the Swales data compared with just four in a corpus of 240
research articles of 1.4 million words: about 160 times more uses. Eighteenth and nine-
teenth century novelists would often use the words ‘gentle reader’ to self-consciously
remind their audience that the text had been written by somebody who wished to guide
them and share their experience of reading. For Swales, the device seems to perform a
similar useful purpose. He often resorts to it to explicitly bring readers into the discourse
at certain points, reminding them that they are linked by a common curiosity and
engaged in the same fascinating endeavour. It is a strategy which has the effect of
152 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

projecting a sympathetic, good humoured and almost avuncular, tone to the discourse.
But while this may be the case, it is also something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it is a
device for leading readers along, putting thoughts, and even words, into their minds to
bring them to the writer’s view. These cases are typical:

(9) As the reader can see, there has been a determined effort here to communicate
appreciation for the work involved, all six invoking the. . . (2004a)

I dare say that the reader has already noticed that the activity itself provides a basis
for the group writing. . . (1990)

By now, the question may have arisen in the reader’s mind ‘‘well, if the typical dis-
sertation (apart from those in strict article-compilation format) is not so much like a
much expanded research article, is it then like an academic monograph?’’ (2004a)

I wince, doubtless like the reader, at the unfortunate sequence of metaphors in the
last two sentences. (1998a)

Now, I can hear the reader thinking ‘‘Surely we can solve this problem by having
the same teacher teach two matched groups of learners using two different
methods’’. (1993)
A more conventional, and obvious, way of engaging readers is through the use of inclu-
sive we. Binding readers to the writer is a common feature of persuasive prose and reader-
inclusive we is the most frequent engagement device in academic writing (Hyland, 2005b).
It is, however, particularly salient in the Swales’ corpus where it is among the top 50 key-
words (significant to over 10 decimal places by the log likelihood statistic). As might be
expected, the majority of these uses in the Swales’ corpus are associated with primary aux-
iliaries (have, are, do) and modals (can, might, need, may, could), but beyond these we can
observe the considerable interactivity of this pronoun in the corpus by noting the most fre-
quent main verbs it combines with. Table 5 lists these main verbs together with their fre-
quencies for up to three words to the right of the keyword.
It is not surprising to find the cognition (or ‘mental’) verbs see, find and know at the
head of the list as these are common in academic writing (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Con-
rad, & Finegan, 1999) and in linguistics in particular (Flottum, Kinn, & Dahl, 2006).
These verbs, when associated with inclusive we, help recruit the reader into the interpreta-
tion process by assigning them a researcher role, guiding readers through an argument and

Table 5
Main verbs (lemmas) collocated with we in the Swales corpus
see 201 expect 24 go 14
need 61 note 22 want 12
find 60 use 22 seem 12
know 54 take 16 examine 10
recognise 25 look 15 learn 10
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 153

towards a preferred reading of the evidence. Typical examples from the corpus show how
this interactive feature often shades into explicit positioning of the reader

(10) As we have seen, in research papers experimental data tend to be given chrono-
logical as well as logical priority. (1990)

And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities
overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities
of detail. (1990)

I think we know in our hearts that the real issues are about how ESP operations are
perceived in the wider administrative and operational environment. (1994)

. . .. . .overall we seem, at least in research and scholarship, to be approaching a sit-

uation in which English is becoming a genuine lingua franca. (2004a)
There is then, in this use of we, an attempt to build a relationship through an implicit
claiming of solidarity with readers. Swales solicits our agreement by establishing a dia-
logue which simultaneously expresses an apparently reasonable point of view to anyone
who has come this far with the argument, and which seeks to head off any misgivings
we may harbour about having done so. There is also among these verbs, however, a more
direct attempt to position readers and lead them along with the argument. By the use of
obligation modals addressed to the reader, Swales presents a more assertive face, interven-
ing to explicitly direct us to a particular understanding, as in these examples:

(11) We can salvage something of our hopes. First, we need to go back and review
what we mean by discoursal competence. Here we need to recognise both the differ-
ence between and the relationship between conversation management and oral genre
skills. (1993)

We now need to know more about how sociolinguistic and sociorhetorical threats
and opportunities play out. (1996a)

I now believe that we should see our attempts to characterize genres as being essen-
tially a metaphorical endeavor. (2004a)
I have elsewhere linked these forms to one of John’s own research interests, that of
imperatives, to emphasise a common directive function (Hyland, 2002a). The corpus sug-
gests however that John is reluctant to employ such forceful and potentially risky strategies,
preferring to finesse his readers rather than bludgeon them with instructions. Imperatives
do occur in the corpus, of course, but these are often ‘textual directives’, pointing readers
to another part of the text or to another text entirely, an altogether far less threatening strat-
egy than telling them how they should interpret an argument.
We also find John using directives for another, more metatextual purpose: bringing us
into the discussion to focus our attention on the issues he considers important and to
navigate us through his exposition. There is a particular fondness for ‘consider’, which
occurs 29 times as an imperative in the corpus, but apart from a few examples of
154 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

‘compare’(6), this is as far as he is prepared to in directing readers through his thinking.

Common imperatives either do not occur at all, or are framed by a softening device which
either dilutes or removes the directive force of the utterance. Typically this is the less
imposing ‘let us’, often accompanied by a mitigating ‘so’ or ‘now’, which has the effect
of transforming an instruction into an invitation:

(12) Now let’s look at the ‘‘of phrase’’ situation in more detail, if only because it is
the commonest structure. (2001b)

So let us consider a few other verbs that have the potential of taking this structure.
(2004c)

Let us assume for the sake of my argument that this model covers all possible con-
tingencies for question-following verbal behavior. (2002b)
More usually, however, John’s preference in this guiding role is for a modalised preface
with inclusive we as subject. As can be seen from the next set of examples, the sense of ten-
tativeness and possibility which the modal imparts to the bare infinitive considerably mit-
igates the imposition of a simple imperative, particularly when the reader is roped into the
idea with the ubiquitous we:

(13) It might be helpful at this juncture to consider a simple hypothetical situation

. . .. (2002b)

Finally, we might note that in neither Move 2 nor Move 3 are there any of those
positive evaluations that seem to be increasing in contemporary research paper intro-
ductions. (2004a)

We may recall the case of Hsin/Gene. (1990)

We could look in a little more detail at the verb associate since it has the highest fre-
quency of passives. (2004c)
Here, once again, we see John deploying linguistic resources which allow him to present
his arguments with courtesy and consideration for the reader, while not compromising
either the clarity of his presentation or the strength of his convictions.

2.4. Reader considerateness

A final category of expressions notable for their frequency in Swales’ writing are those
which carry interactive metadiscourse meanings, considering the reader’s processing of the
text rather than their engagement with its content.
Metadiscourse refers to the interpersonal resources used to organise a discourse or the
writer’s stance towards either its content or audience, shaping arguments to the needs
and expectations of a particular community of readers (Hyland, 2005; Hyland and
Tse, 2004). While metadiscourse is not always defined in the same way, it is a useful
umbrella term for collecting together an heterogeneous array of interpersonal features
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 155

Table 6
Interactive metadiscourse signals in the corpus (p < 0.00000)
So in terms of as opposed to
Final at this juncture we have already seen
Last as we have we can see that
First as it happens despite * to the contrary
Since and the like in * section

of language use with broadly similar rhetorical functions. These can be grouped into two
areas: interactional and interactive, reflecting two sides of the interpersonal metafunction
of language (Hyland, 2005). The former concern many of the features discussed above to
impart an interpersonal tenor to a piece of writing: signalling the level of personality a
writer invests in a text though self mention, hedges, attitude and the markers of reader
involvement. Interactive resources, on the other hand, refer to features which set out an
argument. Sometimes called ‘metatext’ (Bunton, 1999) or ‘text reflexivity’ (Mauranen,
1993), they are concerned with the writer’s awareness of text and ways of organising dis-
course to assist readers to connect, organise and interpret material in a way preferred by
the writer and with regard to the understandings and values of a particular discourse
community.
The keywords lists show several words and expressions which reveal the attention John
gives to monitoring his evolving text to make it coherent for readers (Table 6). Interactive
metadiscourse signals refer to a number of such functions, including the ways writers mark
steps in the discourse, announce their goals and shifts of topic, restate claims and refer to
other parts of the text to make relevant material salient to the reader in recovering the wri-
ter’s intentions. Table 6 lists the most prominent features of this kind in the corpus. These
features include final, first and last which sequence steps in an argument; in the next section
which structures text stages; and in terms of which specifies constraints on the interpreta-
tion or applicability of a statement.
Most commonly, however, John is particularly concerned with assessing what needs to
be made explicit by frequently comparing and summarizing material as he goes along. Sig-
nificant groupings of interactive metadiscourse items in the Swales corpus are used to
express contrast, inference and result, and to summarize material.
John often makes use of arguments which present ideas as contrasts or comparisons. At
the same time, for example, occurs 22 times in the corpus and on the one hand (always with
the article) 41 times. Interestingly, on the other (hand) occurs over three times as often (129
occurrences). This construction is sometimes employed to smuggle a preferred interpreta-
tion into an argument with a sleight of hand, but in Swales’ work it typically represents a
genuine recognition of complex and often puzzling realities:

(14) More precisely, would we do better to interpret such differences as deriving prin-
cipally from, on the one hand, an Islamicized verbalistic tradition and, on the other,
a secularized pragmatic European or North American tradition? (1990)

On the one hand, in most classes critical discussion tends to focus on scholarly books
and research articles. On the other, most Masters programs have a course that deals
with the analysis and use of published teaching materials. (2004b)
156 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

More usually, however, we find options presented as oppositions which might, by more
stylistically less fastidious writers, be linked in other ways, perhaps with a simple conjunc-
tion, or even framed as a different relation altogether. In many cases oppositions could
equally be seen as additive or even sequential and that it is a rhetorical contrast which
is being constructed, rather than a real world one:

(15) On the one hand, they are typically formal documents which remain on file; on
the other, they are rarely part of the public record. (1996a)

On the one hand, there is growing acceptance that it is intuition-rather than database
manipulation per se which underpins successful exploration of a corpus; on the
other, in my own experience there seems to be a larger amount of trial-and-error
involved than in more traditional approaches. (2004a)

On the one hand, requesters may feel that a grateful acknowledgement of compliance
will enhance the chances of a positive response. Secondly, the ‘thanks’ statement
occurs on Reprint Requests because of the essentially ‘one-shot’ nature of the com-
municative event. (1990)
John’s rare lapse in the last example here, for instance, blurs the connection between the
two ‘hands’ and suggests another way of seeing the connection.
A second grouping of items clusters around the expression of inferences about results or
observations. Interpretations seeking to explain why things are as they are or why certain
decisions were made are obviously central to academic writing and figure massively in
Swales’ discourse. These functions can be expressed in numerous ways, mainly by adver-
bials and prepositional phrases, and in the corpus, for instance, we find 362 occurrences of
because, 57 of in consequence, 38 of a * reason (38), 24 as a result of, and 22 due to. These
demonstrate the care with which John ensures readers are able to recover the outcomes of
his argument:

(16) There is a final reason, however, for giving prominence to the RA: the RA has a
dynamic relationship with all the other public research-process genres. (1990)

However, this trend may be partly due to the fact that the Physical Review uses a
numerical/superscript system. Such systems do not easily permit Integral reporting
choices. (1990)

These two intellectual worlds thus continue to be socially constructed poles apart,
perhaps because SLA continues to focus on grammar and its acquisition by young
and often beginning learners. (2000)
Spelling out reasons for research decisions or real-world phenomenon in this way, usu-
ally with a characteristic sprinkling of appropriate caution and mitigation, both reveals
something of how he assesses his audience and their knowledge, and a desire for his rea-
soning to be as transparent as possible to them.
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 157

Finally, there is a strong tendency for regular highlighting and summarizing of the
argument in John’s writing, with an overwhelming preference for overall (40 clause initial
occurrences), as we have seen (38 occurrences) and we have * seen (21).

(17) Overall, I therefore believe that my way of proceeding has been set up not to
predispose or prejudge the existence of discourse communities, but if anything to
presume the opposite. (1996a)

As we have seen, the author of this text opted for a composite ’chunked’ 1-Step 3
followed by a composite Move 2. (1990)

All in all, commodification seems at best a partial, and perhaps even a reversible,
trend. (1996a)

We have already seen that they vary according to complexity of rhetorical purpose -
from the ostensibly simple recipe to the ostensibly complex political speech. (1990)
This regular reviewing of outcomes, and the care in labelling them as such, illustrates
once again John’s metadiscoursal concern for framing his discussion with readers in mind.
An interesting, and quirky, variation on this regular gisting of material is John’s use of
introductory prefaces like it turns out that (14 occurrences) and as it happens (20) which cat-
aphorically alert the reader to events and findings which do not necessarily follow from the
preceding discourse or which might be considered somehow unexpected or counter-intuitive:

(18) Thus it turns out that certain legal, academic and literary texts all point to
another kind of contract that can exist between writer and reader. (1990)

So it turns out that the crash-safety experts are highly urbanized, while the system-
atic biologists, remain surprisingly rural. . . (2004a)

As it happens, Knorr-Cetina’s informants - as well as numerous others - deny that

replication is really possible. (1990)

As it happens, I have long thought (and argued) that it is methodologically unjusti-

fied to pre-select for the discourse analysis of academic texts or transcripts only those
exemplars which have apparently been written or spoken by ‘‘native speakers’’ of
English. (2004a)
These expressions, it seems to me, are quintessentially Swalesian in that they not only
help readers to navigate the discussion, but they do so by lending a strong interpersonal
element to it. They inject an attitude of conviviality into the text as Swales shares a certain
surprise or even amused astonishment with readers at the unfailingly interesting nature of
rhetorical and human behaviour. Here is John, once again, not just informing us of his
findings and reflections, but leading us on a shared journey of exploration into the won-
ders of academic discourse. We see once more that his rhetoric, as much as his ideas, is
informed by a strong sense of social engagement.
158 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

3. A conclusion: individuality and disciplinarity

This has been a strange article for me to write. I have tried to look at the writing of just
one academic and characterise what is distinctive about Swales’ use of language as
opposed to what is interesting about his ideas. I have only been able to look at a small
part of his output, but have tried to characterize his rhetorical style through corpus anal-
ysis techniques and a personal proclivity for the ways academics present themselves and
their readers in their texts. I have also tried, through my own impressions and an abun-
dance of examples, to give a flavour of some of the ways that John approaches the ideas
for which he has become deservedly famous.
The question arises, of course, of how important any of this actually is. Do language
choices make any kind of difference to how we understand an argument and whether we
are persuaded by it? How far does rhetoric maketh the scientist and to what extent can we
attribute the influence of John Swales to the ways he sets out his ideas? The answer, in indi-
vidual cases such as this, is probably ‘just some’. As applied linguists we perhaps attach too
much importance to the object of our trade and John has been quick to chastise those who
suggest that rhetorical choices should be given more credence in academic success than less
tangible attributes such as networking, contacts, experience, craft skills, individual ability,
or even long hours spent pouring over concordance lines. My own social constructionist
excesses have been admonished by an anonymous reviewer on several occasions, in a distinc-
tive prose style which reveals the identity behind the words.
But while individual brilliance will doubtless always shine through, it is equally the case
that we are ultimately defined and judged by our writing. There is an essential and integral
connection between the nature of knowledge and the cultures of disciplinary groups which
is mediated by distinctive patterns of language so that, to put it crudely and no doubt a
shade polemically: we are what we write. An engineer is an engineer because he or she
communicates like one and the same is true for biologists, historians and applied linguists.
In so far as there has been anything which can be graced with the description of ‘argument’
in this paper, it has been that we select our language to take positions, engage with readers
and convey our research with a potential audience in mind.
John’s writing, however, shows that we are not automatons blindly following the dictates
of disciplinary socialisation or the prescriptions of style manuals. The creation of an authorial
persona is clearly also an act of personal choice, where the influence of individual personality,
confidence, experience, and ideological preference all enter the mix to influence our style. The
distinctiveness of John’s voice reveals both the breadth of the options that are acceptable to
community members and the freedom of established disciplinary celebrities to manipulate
them. The fact that John’s personality comes through so strongly in his writing, however,
might also suggest a decision to emphasise an individual persona over a collective ethos as
it hints at, and constructs, an interdisciplinary diversity in the ways that knowledge is argued
and negotiated in EAP. In some ways John’s prose style recalls other ways of talking about
knowledge which perhaps tempers the influences of the empirical social sciences with the
more reflective traditions of the humanities as he introduces us to the ideas he has encoun-
tered and reshaped from thinkers who do not fit neatly into our discipline.
But writers do not construct self-representations from an infinite range of possibilities.
While they are able to control the personal and cultural identity they are projecting in their
writing, they do so by using the cultural resources their communities make available to
them. Knowledge is largely constructed within particular communities of practice and
 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160 159

these communities exist in virtue of a shared set of assumptions and routines about how to
collectively deal with and represent their experiences. While John may wear his heart on
his sleeve more than most with a personally committed and engaging style, he is not writ-
ing in a social vacuum. His disciplinary voice is ultimately achieved by a shrewd assess-
ment of his readers and their socially determined and approved beliefs and value
positions. Although he encourages us to see what he sees in his own way, his independent
creativity is ultimately shaped by an accountability to shared practices. He just does it
better than most of us.

Appendix. The Swales’ corpus

1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research.

1993 Communicative language teaching and the need for discourse structure, In Pro-
ceedings of the MATE conference, Morocco.
1994 ESP in and for human resource development. ESP Malaysia, 2: 1–18.
1995a The role of the textbook in EAP writing research. English for Specific Purposes,
14: 3–18.
1995b Field guides in strange tongues: A workshop for Henry Widdowson. In G. Cook
& B. Seidelhofer (Eds) Principles and practice in the study of language: Studies in
honour of H.G. Widdowson; Oxford University Press (pp. 215–228).
1996a Occluded genres in the academy: The case of the submission letter. In E. Ventola
& A. Mauranen (Eds.) Academic.
1996b Teaching the Conference Abstract. In E. Ventola & A. Mauranen (Eds). Aca-
demic Writing Today and Tomorrow. University of Helsinki Press: Helsinki
(pp. 45–59).
1998a Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a small University Building. Mah-
wah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
1998b Language, Science and Scholarship. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching,
8: 1–18.
2000 Languages for specific purposes Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20: 59–76.
2001a Metatalk in American academic talk: The cases of ‘‘point’’ and ‘‘thing’’. Journal
of English Linguistics, 29:34–54.
2001b Integrated and fragmented worlds: EAP materials and corpus linguistics. In J.
Flowerdew (Ed.) Academic Discourse. (pp. 153–167) London: Longman.
2002a Issues of genre: Purposes, parodies, pedagogies. In A. Moreno & V. Colwell
(Eds.). Recent perspectives on Discourse (pp. 11–26). AESLA: The University
of Leon Press.
2002b On models in applied discourse analysis. In C. Candlin (Ed.) Research on Dis-
course and the Professions. (pp. 61–77). Hong Kong: City University Press.
2004a Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge University Press.
2004b Evolution in the discourse of art criticism: The case of Thomas Eakins. In H.
Backlund et al. (Eds.) Text i arbete/Text at work. (pp. 358–365). Uppsala,
Sweden: The Institute for Nordic Languages.
2004c Then and now: A reconsideration of the first corpus of scientific English. Iberica
8: 5–22.
160 K. Hyland / English for Specific Purposes 27 (2008) 143–160

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Ken Hyland is Professor of Education and director of the Centre for Academic and Professional Literacies at the
Institute of Education, University of London. He has been teaching for 28 years and published over 120 articles
and 11 books on language teaching and academic writing. Recent publications include Teaching and researching
Writing (Longman, 2002), ‘Second Language Writing’ (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Genre and second
language writing(University of Michigan Press, 2004), Metadiscourse (Continuum, 2005) and EAP an advanced
resource book (Routledge, 2006). He is co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes.