Preface - Charles R Cooper and Sidney Greenbaum Introduction - Walter Nash The Stuff These People Write The Literary Argument and Its Discursive Conventions - Susan Peck MacDonald Modality in Literary-Critical Discourse - Paul Simpson Precise and Vague Quantities in Writing on Economics - Joanna Channell Metadiscourse in Popular and Professional Science Discourse - Avon Crismore and Rodney Farnsworth Qualifications in Science - Christopher S Butler Modal Meanings in Scientific Texts When Is a Report Not a Report? Observations from Academic and Non-Academic Settings - Ronald A Carter Writing as an Institutional Practice - Willy van Peer The Writing Student - Mike Hannay and J Lachlan Mackenzie From the Architect of Sentences to the Builder of Texts