The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers concerned that students might turn to large language models (LLMs) to write their assignments. Many of these models are able to create grammatically accurate and coherent texts, thus potentially enabling cheating and undermining literacy and critical thinking skills. This study seeks to explore the extent LLMs can mimic human-produced texts by comparing essays by ChatGPT and student writers. By analyzing 145 essays from each group, we focus on the way writers relate to their readers with respect to the positions they advance in their texts by examining the frequency and types of engagement markers. The findings reveal that student essays are significantly richer in the quantity and variety of engagement features, producing a more interactive and persuasive discourse. The ChatGPT-generated essays exhibited fewer engagement markers, particularly questions and personal asides, indicating its limitations in building interactional arguments. We attribute the patterns in ChatGPT’s output to the language data used to train the model and its underlying statistical algorithms. The study suggests a number of pedagogical implications for incorporating ChatGPT in writing instruction.

Research abstracts are an increasingly important aspect of research articles in all knowledge fields, summarizing the full article and encouraging readers to access it. Graetz suggests that four main features contribute to this purpose—the use of past tense, third person, passive, and the non-use of negatives, although this claim has never been confirmed. In this article, we set out to explore the extent to which these forms are used in the abstracts of four disciplines, the functions they perform and how their frequency has changed over the past 30 years. Drawing on a corpus of 6,000 abstracts taken from the top 10 journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we found high but decreasing frequencies of past tense and passives, an increasing number of third person forms, and more than one negation every two texts. We also noted a remarkable decrease of past tense and passives in the hard sciences and an increase in applied linguistics, with sociologists making greater use of negation. These results suggest that abstracts have developed a distinctive argumentative style, rhetorically linked both to their communicative function and to the changing social contexts in which academic writing is produced and consumed.

Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.