What do they mean? questions in academic writing

Ken Hyland

Published: Hyland, K. 2002. What do they mean? Questions in academic writing.Text, 22(4): 529-557 Abstract

Academic writing is governed by questioning. Papers are written with questions in mind or problems to

solve, and occasionally these emerge as explicit interrogatives. But while they exploit the interactivity of

more familiar conversational discourses, questions in academic writing perform rhetorical functions

which differ considerably from them. In this paper I explore the distribution and use of questions through

an analysis of a 1.8 million word corpus of research articles, textbooks and L2 student essays, and

through interviews with insider informants on their perceptions and practices. The analysis shows that

questions underline the essentially dialogic nature of academic writing as they allow writers to invoke

explicitly the involvement of their readers in the discourse, addressing the perceptions, interests, and

needs of a potential audience. It also reveals that while questions are frequently used to express writers’

purposes, organise texts, evaluate arguments and set up claims, the distribution of these functions differs

across disciplines and genres and crucially depends on participants’ perceptions of rhetorical context.

Abbreviated title: Questions in academic writing

Keywords: Questions, dialogic writing, academic discourse, disciplinary interaction

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What do they mean? questions in academic writing

There is been a growing interest in the interactive and rhetorical character of academic writing, expand-

ing the focus of study beyond the ideational dimension of texts to the ways they function interpersonally.

Writers are seen as doing more than producing texts that plausibly represent an external reality. They are

also perceived as negotiating the status of their claims with their peers, presenting their work in ways that

readers are likely to find both credible and persuasive. Attention has therefore turned to the features writ-

ers draw on to express their arguments, represent themselves, and engage their audiences. Hedges

(Hyland, 1998), imperatives (Swales et al, 1998), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000), and self

mention (Hyland, 2001) have all been found to contribute to the negotiation of a successful writer-reader

relationship. However, one way that writers explicitly bring readers into their texts has received almost

no attention in the research literature, that is the use of questions.

One reason for this neglect is perhaps the perception that their use is rare in academic genres. It is true

that direct questions are under-represented in academic writing and are some 50 times more common in

conversation in the 40 million word Longman corpus (Biber et al, 1999: 211). This is, of course, because

questions are the strategy of dialogic involvement par excellence, often functioning to express an imbal-

ance of knowledge between participants, but also working to create rapport and intimacy. However, a

scan of a large corpus of varied academic genres shows that questions are found in academic prose, and

that they occur where writers seek to explicitly establish the presence of their readers in the text: inviting

engagement and bringing the interlocutor into a discourse arena where they can be led to the writer’s

viewpoint. As in conversational patterns, moreover, the ways that academic writers use questions are

closely related to their assessments of appropriate reader relationships and, as a result, are likely to differ

across generic and disciplinary contexts.

This paper explores this issue, elaborating the ways that questions are used by academic writers to ac-

tively engage their readers and suggesting how genre and discipline can influence the choices they make

to accomplish this. Focusing on the distributions and functions of questions in a large corpus and inter-

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views with writers, I seek to reveal how they are used by writers of research articles, textbooks and stu-

dent assignments in a range of fields to influence argument and interaction.

Questions and engagement

It is notoriously difficult to specify what counts as a question since questions can be defined a variety of

ways. Applied linguists have typically adopted a formal identification and sought to differentiate different

types of independent interrogative clauses (Quirk et al, 1985; Biber et al, 1999). More functionally ori-

ented analysts however have distinguished questions in conversations according to the kinds of responses

they give rise to, functioning to elicit information, clarify the discourse or to confirm an assumption

(Tsui, 1994). Halliday (1994) discusses interrogatives in terms of how they function in the mood system

to express the interpersonal structure of the clause, examining the relationships between mood and speech

acts and the kinds of choices each typically makes available. Characterising questions in terms of inter-

personal meanings in this way shifts the focus from language as form to discourse as action.

This view has largely been taken up by those working in Conversation Analysis and Pragmatics. In CA

questions have been seen as an important structural and topical sequencing device (Schegloff & Sacks,

1973) and a means of orienting to institutional identities (Drew & Sorjonen, 1997; Heritage & Roth,

1995), while pragmatics has revealed their role in eliciting obligatory verbal responses and thus marking

power relations in asymmetrical discourses such as teacher-pupil interactions and courtroom examina-

tions (Harris, 1984). The use of questions to underpin textual coherence in written discourse is a central

feature of Hoey’s (1983) work, but the only study of questions in academic writing is Webber’s (1992)

paper on medical journals. The pedagogic literature is also largely silent on their use. Kirsner and Man-

dell (1987: 67) recommend questions as a means of creating interest in student essays and Swales (1990:

156) observes that they are a “minor way of establishing a niche” in research article introductions, but

they are generally seen as strategies to be avoided (e.g. Swales & Feak, 1994: 74).

Viewing discourse as social action, however, suggests that questions may have an interactional and per-

suasive purpose. To be convincing, arguments must anticipate readers’ expectations, difficulties and re-

sponses, as writers seek to balance their claims for the significance, originality and certainty of their work

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against the possible convictions or confusions of their audience. By inviting engagement, questions em-

phasise the essentially dialogic nature of discourse (Bakhtin, 1986). One of the most obvious ways that

writers project the perceptions, interests, and needs of a potential audience into their unfolding argument

is through the use of questions, as these examples from my corpus illustrate:

(1) We have some reason, then, to reject change-of-expectation accounts of reconsideration, but what can we put in their place? (Philosophy article) What do these two have in common, one might ask? (App Ling article) Why, in southern California, is R. Iaurina primarily restricted to coastal regions? Freezing-induced dieback is a plausible explanation. (Biology article) How can we tell which is the first bit of each byte? (Electronic Engineering textbook)

Questions invite direct collusion because the reader is addressed as someone with an interest in the issue

raised by the question, the ability to recognize the value of asking it, and the good sense to follow the

writer’s response to it. They presuppose and mark the presence of what Thompson (2001) calls the

‘reader-in-the-text’ whose attention is captured and selectively focused on key points or moments in the

writer’s argument. Thus questions serve up an invitation for readers to respond; to orientate themselves in

a certain way to the argument presented. As Webber (1994: 266) points out:

Questions create anticipation, arouse interest, challenge the reader into thinking about the topic of the text, and have a direct appeal in bringing the second person into a kind of dia-logue with the writer, which other rhetorical devices do not have to the same extent.

But while an effective strategy in the hands of experts, not all writers are comfortable with its directness

and possible impact (Chang & Swales, 1999: 161). This partly reflects different disciplinary conventions

of dialogic engagement, but as we shall see, it is also a consequence of the kind of relationship questions

establish with readers.

Procedures and data

The study is based on an analysis of three corpora of written texts and transcribed interviews with writers

and readers of these texts:

• a corpus of 120 research articles (RA), fifteen from each of ten leading journals in eight disciplines,

totalling over 700, 000 words (for titles see Appendix);

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• a corpus of 56 textbook chapters (TB), one from each of seven textbooks from the same eight disci-

plines on students’ reading lists at an English medium university in Hong Kong. 480,000 words;

• a collection of 64 project reports (PR) written by final year Hong Kong undergraduates, eight from

each of eight corresponding disciplines, totalling 630, 000 words.

The expert texts were chosen from a range of disciplines to obtain a relatively broad cross-section of academic

practices and facilitate access to informants: mechanical engineering (ME), electrical engineering (EE), mar-

keting (Mk), philosophy (Phil), sociology (Soc), applied linguistics (AL), physics (Phy) and microbiology

(Bio). The student texts were from fields related to these disciplines: marketing (Mkt), economics (Ec), biol-

ogy (Bio), Information Systems (IS), mechanical engineering (ME), public administration (PA), social science

(SS) and TESL.

These texts were scanned to produce an electronic corpus of 1.8 million words (excluding appendices, refer-

ences, and text in tables). The corpus was then searched for direct questions using WordPilot 2000, a com-

mercially available concordance programme. Because my major concern in this study was to achieve a consis-

tent and efficient survey of questions across a range of heterogeneous genres and disciplines, I chose a simple

operational definition of questions based mainly on syntactic form, to include any independent interrogative

clause, tag, or sentence fragment which concluded with a question mark. All instances were examined in con-

text to determine their pragmatic function and those in quotes were disregarded.

In addition to the text analyses, I interviewed 17 students (all Cantonese L1) and 8 staff (mainly English

L1) from the above disciplines. The faculty members were experienced researcher/writers who frequently

read, and occasionally published, in the journals studied, regularly supervised the student projects and

often selected the textbooks. The interviews followed a semi-structured format (Cohen, Manion & Morri-

son, 2000: 270) employing open-ended interview prompts which allowed peripheral topics to be fol-

lowed-up if raised in the discussion. I was interested in student uses and perceptions as a balance to the

professional genres and to see if questions were used to establish relationships in the same ways. The stu-

dents’ views were collected through focus group discussions to reduce the formality and possible discom-

fort of a more intimidating interview. In both cases I was keen to elicit participants’ understandings of the

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meanings and effectiveness of the use of questions to discover something of their own preferences and

thoughts on disciplinary practices as both writers and readers.

Genre and disciplinary patterns

There were 1,297 questions overall in the corpus, about one every three pages, although their use and

forms differed considerably across genre and discipline. Most were Wh forms and about a third were po-

lar yes/no questions, There was only one tag and just a handful of alternative questions (ie. with or).

Genre patterns. Achieving engagement with readers is a crucial element of most types of argument as we

need to encourage our audience at least to continue reading, if not accept what we have to say. Table 1,

however, shows that the use of questions as a strategy of engagement varies across genres, suggesting

that writers make different assessments of readers’ likely responses to the interpersonal tone in which

they present their messages. While questions were a common strategy in expert-novice interaction, they

were less frequent in the other genres.

Table 1: Genre variation in use and forms of questions Totals Wh forms Yes/No Alternative (per 10,000 words) (%) (%) (%) Textbooks 13.3 73.9 24.2 1.9 Research articles 5.5 77.8 21.0 1.2 Student reports 4.3 57.6 42.1 0.3 Overall 7.2 69.8 29.1 1.1 A possible reason for such variation is that while questions seek to involve readers in both the argument

and the ethos of a text, they may also construct unequal social relationships. Questions convey authority

along with intimacy, carrying the implication that the writer is in full control of both his or her material

and, often, of his or her audience as well, but not all genres confer such rights. While individual writers

have some freedom to resist the relationships implied in a genre, their choices are underpinned by institu-

tional and intertextual constraints, or ‘Orders of Discourse’ (Fairclough, 1992), which provide patterns

for interaction linked to certain established beliefs. Appealing to readers from the pages of a research pa-

per, for instance, requires the egalitarian stance that social distinctions of power and status are unimpor-

tant to how the paper will be received, while the authoritative discourse of the textbook clearly distin-

guishes expert from novice and recreates (or perhaps reflects) the pedagogic model of the schoolroom.

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The fact that the undergraduate final year project report is an assessment genre, on the other hand, means

that readers’ judgements have material consequences and encourages a recognition of readers’ greater

experience and power.

An overt display of authority may have advantages for textbook authors, whose efforts to directly engage

readers can also express disciplinary expertise and distinguish expert from novice:

(2) Think of yourself as an obvious example ("model case") of a person. What are the characteris-tics that make you a person? (Phil TB) Let us start with the question "How do we proceed to obtain improved properties in a polymeric material?" There are four ways: (Phy TB) Are there fungi which specialize in exploiting dung? And if there are, how do they gain access to this substrate when it becomes available? The answers may surprise you. (Bio TB)

Here questions invoke a solid and competent writer in full command of his or her material. At the same

time they help to construct readers as learners, and learning as a one-way transfer of knowledge from an

expert to an apprentice. Textbook writers speak mainly to students, and the frequency with which they

use questions suggests the didactic and unequal relationships of the classroom. This may also contribute

to the slightly greater use of alternate questions, a more explicit form of a yes/no type.

In the consciously cultivated egalitarian relationships of the research paper however, writers employ

questions less often, although they are used with sufficient frequency to suggest they serve useful rhetori-

cal purposes. While questions often retain an element of discourse control, with the questioner leading

the reader in a certain direction, there is more of an assumption of sharedness in the research papers. The

questions in (3), for example, are not being asked of readers, but on their behalf. The writers seem to be

drawing on readers’ disciplinary understandings, both to invest a problem with significance and invite the

reader to explore an unresolved issue. The reader then, is recruited as an equal partner, to share the

writer’s curiosity and follow where the argument leads:

(3) Given the complexity of mycorrhizal functioning in the real world, IS there any hope of un-derstanding these systems well enough to manage them in forestry and agriculture? (Bio RA) Thus, if a subject is unable to judge correctly a violation of UG as ungrammatical, does this nec-essarily mean he or she does not have access to UG? Or, could it simply mean he or she cannot perform well on this kind of task? (App Ling RA)

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The hardest hit sector during this recession has been that of durable goods, whilst spending on consumer goods has been less affected. What has caused this behaviour? (Mkt RA)

Thus questions in the articles sought collaboration and served to express the writer’s confidence and in-

timacy with the discipline’s current understandings, argument forms and ways of establishing truth.

While the student corpus revealed similar frequencies to the research writers, these writers were less ad-

venturous in their use of questions, perhaps anxious to avoid their potentially authoritative impact, as

some of my interviewees mentioned:.

I never think to ask a question in the report. How can I ask a question in my report? Teach-ers ask questions and I am answering the questions. I think my supervisor doesn’t want me to ask him questions but to answer questions. I leave it out. (Bio student) I don’t want to make myself important. Of course it is my project and my result, but I am just ordinary student. Not an academic scholar with lots of knowledge and confident for myself. (TESL student)

Students tended to follow conversational patterns in employing more yes/no questions and using ques-

tions far more explicitly as a means of organizing their discourse. Many students used questions to recy-

cle their research questions as section headings, for example, seeking to transform a formal means of in-

terrogating data into a rhetorical strategy, although others used these questions very competently:

(4) 2: Are there any differences in their motivation of the students receiving two different types of instruction? (TESL PR) 1. 7 Why choose zebrafish as model in this study? (Bio PR) Is this pattern more obvious in Chinese dating couples? Do men and women behave differently in handling conflicts? How does Chinese culture influence this sex differences in handling the conflicts? Will the high-context society, like Chinese, with well-defined gender roles in dating and marriage, affect the conflict-management skills of couples? Would the women still use ac-commodation in handling the conflicts? (SS PR)

Disciplinary distributions We see from Table 2 that the use of questions also varies enormously across

fields. Questions in the softer subjects represent a more significant rhetorical resource, a way of setting

out arguments and interacting with readers which have become routine practices. Together the papers in

philosophy, sociology, applied linguistics and marketing, and the essays in their related teaching disci-

plines, contained 86% of all questions in the corpora. This disparity was particularly noticeable in the

articles, where questions were six times more frequent per 10,000 words in the humanities and social sci-

ences, and in the textbooks, where they were four times more common. The heavy use of questions is

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particularly marked in philosophy where they comprised about one third of all cases in the research pa-

pers and half of those in the textbooks.

Table 2: Disciplinary variations in use of questions (per 10,000 words) Field Textbooks Articles Field Reports

Philosophy 44.5 12.5 Social Sciences 8.8

Marketing 13.3 7.2 TESL 6.7

App Linguistics 11.6 6.4 Public Admin 6.0

Sociology 9.6 5.3 Economics 1.5

Marketing 1.1

Totals Soft Fields 21.0 7.8 5.3

Biology 5.4 1.8 Biology 1.0

Physics 5.3 1.3 Info Systems 2.2

Mechanical Eng 4.1 1.3 Mechanical Eng 3.0

Electronic Eng 3.5 0.6

Totals Hard Fields 4.5 1.3 2.3 Overall 13.3 5.5 4.3

This concentration of questions in writing in the soft fields is similar to the distribution of other interac-

tional features in academic writing. While all writing needs to solicit reader collusion and carry an audi-

ence through an argument, the most explicit interactional signals tend to cluster in humanities and social

science papers (Hyland 2000, 2001a & b). My science informants, in fact, tended to see questions as a

distraction in an argument:

Questions are quite rare in my field I think. You might find them in textbooks I suppose, but generally we don’t use them. They seem rather intrusive, don’t they? Too personal. We gen-erally prefer not to be too intrusive. (ME interview) I am looking for the results in a paper, and to see if the method was sound. I am looking for relevance and that kind of dressing is irrelevant. People don’t ask questions as it would be seen as irrelevant. And condescending probably. (EE interview)

These distributions are partly due to the very different ways that hard and soft disciplines conduct re-

search and negotiate knowledge (Brodkey, 1987; Whitley, 1984). That is, rhetorical variations are related

to social and epistemological variations.

Maintaining an effective degree of personal engagement with one’s audience is crucial for soft knowl-

edge writers as their material is more explicitly interpretative and less abstract than in the sciences. Rela-

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tionships and connections between entities are generally more particular, less precisely measurable, and

less clear-cut than in the hard fields. Research tends to be more influenced by the contextual vagaries of

human behaviour so there is less control of variables, greater diversity of research outcomes and fewer

unequivocal bases for accepting claims. As a result, writers are less able to locate their interpretations in

accepted statistical or laboratory analyses or to rhetorically strengthen their claims through the replicabil-

ity of experimental procedures. Successful communication depends to a greater extent on the author’s

ability to invoke a real writer in the text, focusing readers on the claim-making negotiations of the dis-

course community, the arguments themselves, rather than the controlled behaviour of real-world phe-

nomena. This means that they have to more explicitly enter into the argument and refer to readers as real

players in the discussion rather than merely as implied observers.

Questions clearly facilitate this kind of engagement; a fact my faculty informants were well aware of:

Readers are familiar with questions as a way of exchanging information and this works in writing too. They help you keep in touch with readers so they know where you are going. (AL interview)

I like to include the reader in the argument. Often I structure the argument by putting the problems that they might ask. (Mkt interview)

In my field that’s all there are, questions. Putting the main issues in the form of questions is a way of presenting my argument clearly and showing them I am on the same wavelength as them. (Phil interview)

As these quotes suggest however, while writers use questions to engage their readers, they do so with

different purposes in mind. I now turn to these purposes.

Why use questions? Functions in academic genres

I have argued that questions are essentially dialogic and function to engage readers, but frequencies alone

cannot show us how questions construct texts and relationships. It is clear that relationships can be nego-

tiated in numerous ways and study of the sentences in which questions occurred, including their position

in the overall text, their content, and the utterance which followed, revealed that questions served seven

central purposes for these writers: arousing interest, framing purposes, establishing a research niche, or-

ganising the discourse, expressing an attitude or evaluation, conveying a claim, and suggesting further

research. In this section I will briefly consider each of these functions in turn.

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Table 3 shows the distribution of these broad functions across the three genres. About a third of all ques-

tions were used to organise the discourse and another 20% served to set out the writer’s purpose. While

these two functions appear to be largely textual, working to lead readers through an argument, they si-

multaneously build a relationship with readers: marking an assessment of not only what needs to be made

explicit to a particular audience, but how this can appropriately be done. Questions in this context repre-

sent the presence of the audience in the text in terms of the writer’s awareness of both potential process-

ing difficulties and of appropriate interactional options. These functions were particularly heavily used by

textbook writers and students, while research writers tended to use questions for more argumentative

purposes such as establishing a niche for their work, evaluating statements and supporting claims. I shall

discuss each function below, suggesting that the distributions indicate the sensitivity of writers to their

audiences and the rhetorical contexts in which they are writing.

Table 3: Functional distribution of questions by genre (%) Create Frame Organise Establish Express Support Suggest Totals interest Purpose text niche evaluation claim research Textbooks 0.0 22.7 34.7 3.7 4.1 30.4 4.4 100

Articles 1.9 19.5 21.5 10.1 18.6 20.2 8.2 100

Reports 0.0 22.1 46.2 7.3 6.3 12.8 5.3 100

Overall 0.5 21.6 33.3 6.3 8.9 23.7 5.7 100

i. Getting attention: questions in titles

The title is generally the reader’s first encounter with a text and may be the point where a decision is

made whether to read on and give the accompanying paper further attention, or to ignore it. As these ex-

amples suggest, questions can help grab the reader at the outset with an arresting directness. This may

appeal not only to the reader’s possible interest in a current disciplinary issue, but demand attention with

a striking expression:

(5) Dictionary Use by EFL Writers: What Really Happens?. (AL RA) Can critical research influence policy? (Soc RA) Truth Without People? (Phil RA) Does size matter? - objectives and measures at UK trade exhibitions (Mkt RA)

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But while questions in a title can help rouse the interest of potential readers and identify the main topic of

a paper (Webber, 1994), only research writers in the soft fields used questions in this way with no exam-

ples at all in the hard fields or other genres. The span of coverage and the topics addressed by student

reports and textbooks obviously limit the opportunities for this strategy. Textbooks seek to extend the

learners’ experience and understanding of a subject by providing a coherently ordered epistemological

map of the disciplinary landscape, while student project reports attempt to demonstrate the acquisition of

this knowledge and the competence to apply it. Typically then, the breadth of content of these genres is

not easily reducible to a single overarching question. More centrally however, the fact that both genres

are principally pedagogic means that they are typically assigned to readers and their intrinsic merits play

little part in any decision to read them.

Research articles, on the other hand, exist in a highly competitive environment. Potential readers are con-

fronted with a huge number of scholarly papers which make heavy demands on their ability to digest and

synthesize what is relevant and worth attending to. The time needed to examine this massive research

output means that academics increasingly rely on strategies which involve scanning both titles in journal

contents tables and abstracts to find what is relevant and interesting before deciding whether to read fur-

ther (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995:30). This, then, is one point where a piece of research may stand or

fall, where the reader must be hooked. Questions in titles are therefore never a naïve display of ignorance,

nor do they simply signal the topic of a paper. They both promote the article itself to the reader and rep-

resent the writer as someone with an insider’s understanding of what constitutes a real issue and, one as-

sumes, a plausible response to it. As my sociology informant stated:

I always give the title some thought before sending off a paper. It’s important because it not only tells people what your writing about, but can communicate something of your style, how you are writing about it. Your approach and so on, how you are going to present the problem. I think it’s really effective if I can phrase the issue as a question. Something snappy which gets attention but doesn’t trivialize it at all. I notice questions in the titles and think it works. Yes, I don’t see why we don’t use them more often. (Soc interview)

ii. Framing the discourse

In a traditional sense, academic writing is governed by questioning. It is written with a question in mind,

a problem to solve, and seeks to explore that question using the theories and procedures of the discipline.

It is perhaps not surprising that these questions often surface in introductions to provide an initial frame-

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work for the discourse; writers posing the questions to be addressed in the first few paragraphs and then

picking them up again, either in sub-headings or section introductions, through the text to hold the

reader’s interest and structure their responses to them. Behind the broadly similar figures in Table 3

above however, there were considerable genre differences in how writers used questions in this way.

The students typically used the introduction to set out their research questions, with over 80% of the re-

ports containing questions which helped focus the paper and provide a sense of direction for the reader.

Some writers took this opportunity to genuinely engage the reader’s interest (6), but many were simple

recitations of questions designed as an agenda for the discussion (7):

(6) But nowadays, to what extent are Hong Kong people still influenced by the Chinese culture? Do the Chinese culture affect the conflict management style? In the intimate relationship, would Hong Kong Chinese show more conflict avoidance than people from other cultures? Is the avoidance style more acceptable to the Chinese couples? Would Chinese females and males show different patterns of conflict management? (PSA PR) (7) The following research questions are addressed in this study: 1. Is there any correlation among the triarchic abilities? 2 Is there any gender difference in the triarchic abilities? 3 Does any particular type of intelligence predict academic performance? 4 Do students with extra-curricular activities have higher scores in any particular type of ability than those without responsibilities? 5 Is there any correlation between successful intelligence and triarchic abilities? (Soc PR)

The last example demonstrates both the apparent preference for polar questions in the student reports and

a reluctance to use them to directly address the reader. The priority here seems to be a desire to manage

the structure of the argument and the flow of information rather than capture their interest or appeal to

their disciplinary curiosity.

Textbook authors used questions in a similar way in their introductions, less to bring their readers into the

discourse than to foreground what was important in the following text. Over half the cases in introduc-

tory sections of chapters or sections metadiscoursally referred to the questions themselves, as objects of

the text and not elements of interaction between writer and reader:

(8) One of the most basic questions we can ponder is, "Who or what am I? What is it that is unique or different about me?" How do we answer that? (Phil TB) The total design process is of interest to us in this chapter. How does it begin? Does the engineer simply sit down at his or her desk with a blank sheet of paper and jot down some ideas? What happens next? What factors influence or control the decisions which have to be made? Finally, how does this design process end? (ME TB)

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Is eye contact appropriate between two participants in a conversation? When is it permissible not to maintain eye contact? What does eye contact or the absence thereof signal? (AL TB) Watch for the answers to the following questions as you read the chapter. They should help you understand the material presented. 1. What are the basic Boolean theorems and postulates? 2. What is DeMorgan's theorem? 3. What is a truth table? 4. How is a SOP expression obtained? 5. How is a POS expression obtained? 6. What is a canonical logic form? 7. How are logic circuits designed using only NAND (NOR) gates? (EE TB)

It is clear from these examples however, that while this technique highlights ideational rather than inter-

actional elements, it also manages to effect an unambiguous relationship with the reader: one where a

primary knower takes control of both the discourse and the audience.

It is also interesting to note the clustering of questions in these examples. Most clusters occurred in intro-

ductory sections and conclusions, opening the discourse with a flurry of issues to be addressed in the pa-

per or remaining to be answered in the future. Thus clusters either served a framing purpose, sought to

position the research in terms of its significance to the field or readers, or raise the unanswered issues

which followed from the completed work. These combinations of questions work to draw the reader ever

deeper into the writer’s world, having the cumulative effect of bringing a potentially skeptical or uninter-

ested audience to a position where they share the writer’s curiosity and excitement.

iii. Organising the text: guiding the reader with sub-headings and discourse signals

A third of all questions in the corpus were used to organise the discourse and this function was particu-

larly heavily represented in the student texts, especially in the soft papers.

The use of questions in sub-headings was exclusively a feature of the soft knowledge fields in the profes-

sional genres, but they occurred in all disciplines in the student assignments. Punctuating a text with sub-

heads is a recognised readability strategy, identifying what is to be addressed in the ensuing section. A

question adds an interpersonal dimension to this textual feature, nudging readers’ interest by encouraging

them to search their previous knowledge and consider their own response to the issue.

(12) How does metal fatigue? (ME PR) Why use Windows environment? (IS PR)

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Are behaviour differences biologically based? (Soc TB) What is the impact of these problems on learners? (TESL PR) What is marketing research? (Mkt TB) Scope to the rescue? (Phil RA)

By structuring a paper through a series of interrogative sub-heads, common in both textbooks and re-

ports, writers can not only generate interest in what follows but also create some sense of progression as

writer and reader work together towards a greater understanding of the topic. A sense of the effect of this

is shown in the consecutive sub-heads from a textbook chapter on The Family:

(13) What is a family? Is the family universal? The New World Black family - an exception to the rule? The kibbutz,- the abolition of the family? The isolated nuclear family? (Soc TB)

The use of questions as in-text signals to navigate the reader through an argument is overwhelmingly

found in the soft disciplines in all three genres. As we noted above, the soft fields lack the highly special-

ised code of the sciences which allows a succinctness and precision founded on more certain assessments

of shared topical and procedural knowledge. Instead, readers must be metadiscoursally led where writers

wish them to go, moving from old to new information and explicitly establishing preferred interpretations

of propositional meanings to ensure that they recover the writer’s intentions.

(14) What are we to conclude from these data? (Soc RA) How is the gender difference shorted? It can be explained by the Equity- Restoring Strategies by which males alter their bases for comparison. (PA PR) How should one express gratitude for a meal in another culture? Is it possible to refuse an invita-tion politely? How should one greet people in different speech communities? These are the kinds of questions which will be touched on in the final section of this chapter. (AL TB) Where does that leave us? We have yet to develop a fully plausible theory about morality. In the next chapter, we'll try to make some new beginnings by examining the structure of moral justifi-cation. (Phil TB) Returning to our first topic, advanced engineering polymers, let us start with the question "How do we proceed to obtain improved properties in a polymeric material?" There are four ways: (Phy TB)

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To some extent all questions in academic prose seek to direct the reader in one direction rather than an-

other and we should be aware of this when considering their discourse functions. I am drawing attention

to this as a discrete function only in clear cases where explicit reference is made to text organisation, ei-

ther introducing shifts in the discourse or preparing for the next step in an argument. What is important to

note however is that the use of questions as discourse organisers carry a hidden agenda. They represent

the writer’s awareness of audience and the extent to which the he or she wishes to restrict the reader’s

selection of alternative interpretations and directions. Once again, at least some of my informants seemed

to be fully aware of the effects of these strategies:

I have seen them in physics papers. Mainly it helps to structure the ideas I think. It works in

a direct way to structure the ideas. (Phy interview)

I’m not really sure of the conventions of using questions, but I tend to use them a lot. It’s a

useful way of keeping the reader with you, making sure they are following the argument and

understanding it the way you do. (Soc interview)

iv. Creating a niche

It is not enough for research writers to simply present the topic and preview their discourse. Introductory

questions are, as Swales (1990) observes, a rhetorical strategy for “establishing a niche” for one’s re-

search. More specifically, writers are able to use this strategy to raise questions about current theories (9),

or to indicate a gap in the literature (10):

(9) Thus a central question should be: to what extent has the focus on identity hindered the pro-gress in the study of social movements by offering cause to celebrate at the expense of critical in-sight? Have we moved from overemphasizing class relations and/or revolutionary conditions to overemphasizing the existence of alternative epistemological communities, at the expense of so-ber political analysis? As I will argue more fully below, my answer to this question is that there have been tendencies in the literature that give cause for concern. (Soc RA) However, these theories have been generated in the Western culture. To what extent these theo-retical framework can be applied to the Eastern culture? (SS PR) (10) In this article, we examine two unaddressed questions concerning customers' relationships with service providers: Are all customers equally receptive to maintaining service relationships? And what are the consequences of different customer motivations for maintaining service rela-tionships? (Mkt RA) However, which point in a moving body is a characteristic point? What special geometrical prop-erties does its trajectory have? Where are they? And next, which line in a moving body is a char-acteristic line? What special geometrical properties does its trajectory have? And where is it lo-cated? How can we identify the characteristic lines into the axis of C-pair, H-pair, R-pair and P-pair respectively? and so on. None of these problems are completely solved so far. (ME RA)

16

Once again there is a clustering of questions in these introductions, insistently reinforcing one another to

suck readers into a topic which promises to be both important and absorbing.

In addition to establishing a niche, research writers also used questions to claim centrality for their work,

a strategy which appeals to readers “to accept that the research about to be reported is part of a lively,

significant or well-established research area” (Swales, 1990: 144). While Swales does not mention ques-

tions as a ‘claiming centrality’ strategy, they appear to be a rhetorical option for writers in the soft fields

to set up an issue as worth learning more about:

(11) What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low-status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide de-clined? (Soc RA) How can essentialism be true? What is the place in nature for such a thing as de re necessity? Where could it come from? (Phil RA) This research is intended to be a contribution to the deeper understanding of internal marketing, its relevance and its limits. The questions I will raise in interpreting the case are these: How can the dynamics of internal marketing be understood? What is the role of internal networks in rela-tion to internal marketing activity? (Mkt RA)

Clearly, although these uses are almost always realised as Wh forms, the questions posed in these exam-

ples have little to do with eliciting information. They are rhetorical strategies of engagement and promo-

tion. They serve not only to invest a problem with significance, but also to invite the reader to explore an

unresolved issue with the writer as an equal, to share his or her curiosity and follow the argument to an

answer.

v. Expressing an attitude and counter-claiming

Interrogative forms are often used to express an evaluation of an idea, either positively or negatively.

This is frequently a critical posture, or at least one which carries a strong intimation of distancing the

writer from the proposition, and is usually followed by a reason for the questioning. Examples occured

far more frequently in the social sciences and humanities research articles, comprising a third of all cases,

and only occasionally in textbooks and student reports. These examples give an idea of this use: (15) One can also take issue with Wilson's analysis of fairness. We certainly have a sense of fair-ness and, more generally, a sense of values. Yet why are these values preferred in particular cir-cumstances and not in others? Why is fairness defined in one way in some circumstances and otherwise in others? (Soc RA)

17

On Dworkin's interpretation of his own model, whether describing how conservatives and liberals agree or disagree, people's measurements of cosmic badness are based directly on calculations of the relative weights assigned to natural versus human investments. But is it true that for people concerned about intrinsic value that this direct calculation about weights is all that counts? Let me suggest that for many such people-conservative and liberal alike-it is not. (Phil RA) However, there is a danger of a form of discursive reductionism here if emotions are defined only as discursively created experiences. Is emotion simply discourse, in which case the study of emotions would be just a part of discourse analysis, or is there something more distinctive about the study of emotion? Jackson seems to suggest both these options. (AL RA)

The reader is recruited into a virtual debate to support the author’s evaluation through the question. As

readers we are treated both as knowledgeable colleagues and active participants who share the writer’s

concerns. This strategy, moreover, is not only used to critically examine others’ work, but to present ten-

tative counter-claims by framing what appear to be the reader’s reservations regarding the validity of a

foregoing argument. The question is used to both undermine a prior argument and to hedge an alternative

claim as the writer explicitly draws readers into the deductive process, rhetorically treating the audience

as capable of making the same logical inferences (Hyland, 1998): (16) What, then, could be wrong with deliberation? To begin, one might simply be suspicious of the near consensus among democratic theorists on its behalf. (Phil RA) Thus, if a subject is unable to judge correctly a violation of UG as ungrammatical, does this nec-essarily mean he or she does not have access to UG? Or, could it simply mean he or she cannot perform well on this kind of task? (AL RA) But what is the physical nature of the Schwarzschild horizon? What is going on there? Is it a real singularitity of spacetime or merely an artifact of the chosen coordinate system? These questions can be answered by transforming the solution into local geodesic coordinates. (Phy RA)

vi. Setting up claims

In addition to conveying a tentative attitude towards statements, questions also play an important role in

presenting the writer’s stance, challenging the reader to think about an issue, but anticipating the asser-

tion of an opinion. Unlike conversational contexts, very few questions in academic writing originate in

ignorance: they are not motivated by the writer’s desire to gain information or to think aloud about some

unsolved mystery. Their importance lies in helping the writer to create what appears to be a jointly con-

structed textual environment for exploration, providing writers with a rhetorical space to contribute to the

completion of the text and the achievement of its objectives. My Philosophy respondent clearly had this

function in mind:

18

I suppose it’s a bit deceptive maybe. I’m asking the questions they might ask, but they are my questions. Ones I can answer and that take them where I am going. (Phil interview)

Perhaps the clearest example of how questions can both guide and position readers is their use in what

Bloor (1996) calls “tales”, or hypothetical narratives. While also found in economics textbooks (Tadros,

1994; Bondi, 1999) and occasionally in my marketing article corpus, these mainly occur in philosophy

genres where they manoeuvre readers into agreement with a position through a direct, almost intimately

conversational, appeal. By developing a line of reasoning within the confines of a recount of imaginary

events, the writer can create a context for shared understanding that is both highly interactive and dis-

plays the honest reasonableness of the writer. The question brings the reader to the heart of the matter,

and often to agreement. Take, for instance, this example where Perry has just witnessed Doris drive her

car into a tree:

(17) He feels that he must rescue the driver now or else she'll surely die. So, with considerable trepidation, Perry rushes in and quickly drags Doris free from the wreck, thinking that at any moment both he and she might get caught in the explosion. At last, when he judges that they are far enough away from the car, he collapses, exhausted, onto the ground, with Doris lying in his arms. As it happens, the car does not explode. Within a couple of minutes, Perry hears sirens wailing. Soon after, some emergency vehicles screech to a halt. Paramedics jump out. They run over to Perry and Doris. Perry tells them what happened. The paramedics take a look at Doris, and they arrive at a chilling conclusion: Perry has paralysed Doris. Is Perry morally responsible for what he has done? (Phil RA)

A mainly textbook variation on this strategy is to directly involve the reader as a protagonist in the tale,

thereby creating greater involvement. We are projected into the narrative and questions used to bring us

to the writer’s conclusion through an apparently reflexive process. This example shows how the strategy

positively invites collusion, imprisoning the reader in the obvious logic of an argument.

(18) Imagine that you have worked for weeks on a paper on Thomas More for your Renaissance History course and you have just finished writing it. You decide to go out for a snack, leaving the paper on your desk. While you're gone, your dog Bailey jumps up on your desk and chews up the paper. What's your reaction when you return? No doubt you're angry, but do you blame Bai-ley? Do you lecture him about the importance of respecting your things and tell him how disap-pointed you are at his insensitivity? Of course not. He's a dog. Whose fault was it? Bailey's? Hardly. He was acting like a normal dog, and we do not hold dogs responsible for their actions. It was your fault, not his. Did he know what he was doing and intentionally ruin your assign-ment? Not very likely. (Phil TB)

Hypothetical narratives are only the most obvious way that writers can use questions persuasively. This

kind of rhetorical positioning of readers is particularly transparent when the writer poses a question only

19

to reply immediately, simultaneously initiating and closing the dialogue. Setting up the reader to intro-

duce a claim in this way is a common feature of research articles in the soft fields:

(20) Are there objects that, by themselves, demand a certain sort of rigid designation rather than some other? The question has to be answered in the positive. (Phil RA) Is it, in fact, necessary to choose between nurture and nature? My contention is that it is not. (Soc RA) What do these two have in common, one might ask? The answer is that, despite all appearances, they share the same politics. (AL RA) Does the BIV thereby succeed in including the relation in which it stands to its environment in the extension of its term 'the delusive relation'? There are, I think, compelling reasons to say that it does not. (Phil RA)

The question is suddenly interjected into the smooth flow of syntactically similar sentences on behalf of

the intelligent reader who has followed the discussion to this point and is eager to cut to the chase.

So while the reader appears to be the judge, the writer anticipates a response by incorporating it into the

next utterance. Such a move disguises an assertion as a question and this, of course, is a staple strategy of

textbook authors:

(19) But how do they compete successfully for this substrate? The answer here may be a little unexpected, but it is nevertheless perfectly logical. (Bio TB) How will we look back 100 years from now and characterize the present era? Almost certainly the answer lies in our recent efforts to engage in communicative language teaching. (AL TB) What then are "lichenized fungi"? They are fungi, mostly Ascomycetes, that become associated with algal cells in a symbiotic relationship enabling…. (Bio TB) If you release a coin from above your head inside the car, how will it fall? It falls straight down-ward and hits the floor directly below the point of release. (Phy TB)

Perhaps surprisingly given the ubiquity of rhetorical questions in everyday discourse, this is a strategy

relatively underused by the students in this study, although the reports contained some effective rhetorical

uses: (21) If one does think that pornography implies woman as a class enjoys being degraded, is it appropriate for us to say that this thought is derived from the misinterpretation of the readers? The answer is YES! The readers exaggerate the notion of degradation existing in pornography. (PSA PR) How is the gender difference shorted? It can be explained by one of the Equity-Restoring Strate-gies by which male alters their bases for comparison. (SS PR)

20

This, however, is reader positioning in its most naked form and my student informants were hesitant

about endorsing its use. In the interviews no students said they felt completely comfortable using ques-

tions to persuade readers, and two admitted they never used them: I don’t think this is used in Engineering papers. Too informal I think. I never ask the reader

a question. It is OK for textbooks because these must be easy for students to understand,

but I don’t use it in my project. (ME student)

If I ask a question and give the answer this is very strong. Will my supervisor like to see

this? I don’t know. I write the research questions but I don’t ask a question and give the an-

swer like this. (Bus student)

The most manipulative rhetorical questions, however, offer no answers at all. They position readers by

presupposing their response as well; assuming they will go along with the writer and see the answer as

obvious. This can be an effective way of concluding a text, and while few writers adopted it, a question

offers a powerful form of closure by forcefully emphasising the main point of the paper.

(21) What can we know from a perspective limited to monolingual, monocultural writers and writing? Is the question really how a monolingual community learns culture-specific forms? Or is it the wider question of how different writers learn to deal with variable demands in various situations? (AL RA) This brings me back to the naturalist conception of philosophy. Let us suppose the naturalist has unmasked his or her early speculative fantasies as just another version of metaphysical hocus-pocus. What, then, remains on the naturalist's philosophical agenda? Writing popular books about special sciences? Becoming a scientific specialist like any other? Playing the role of a go-between in order to reinforce the links between adjacent sciences? Or what? (Phil RA)

vii. Pointing forward: Real questions?

Finally, the corpus contained questions which genuinely sought information rather than anticipated a spe-

cific response, with some 6% of cases being real or ‘open’ questions. While these questions can be found

at critical points in an argument anywhere in a text, they tend to occur in concluding sections: raising un-

resolved issues and emergent matters to be addressed in future studies. The use of closing questions how-

ever was not a strategy widely used outside the soft research articles. Perhaps this is because the peda-

gogic authority of textbooks depends in some measure on answering the questions it raises and authors

prefer to leave as few loose ends as possible. The report genre also sets out to display knowledge rather

than ignorance, and raising unanswered questions to one’s assessor may create more difficulties than one

21

wants to deal with at the end of a year-long research project. It is the role of professional research how-

ever to reveal questions as well as answer them, as Adams Smith (1987: 19-20) observes:

It is common for a piece of research to answer the question it has set out to clarify while at the same time it raises other questions to be accounted for in the course of further investi-gation.

Occasionally these questions surface as interrogatives.

Conclusions, then, are where we find most examples of ‘genuine’ questions, indicating gaps in present

knowledge and appealing for further research. These examples are the closing lines of three articles:

(22) Such a focus would help address important questions left unanswered by the present study. For example, how do readers interpret the NYT and WP accounts of the Iraq/Saudi Arabia pro-jected event? Do they readily accept the accounts of the projected event as presupposed and un-challengeable information? To what extent are they aware of the political and social interests underlying the accounts? (AL RA) Future capital punishment research should give attention to its use by the military. Such research might confirm the findings reported here, and offer insight into how it is used by military forces across the globe. Are other militaries more or less command-influenced in their justice systems? Do they use capital punishment to address societal tensions and problems, such as sexual racism? (Soc RA) Very little is also known about the criteria used by manufacturers in recruiting prospective ED resellers. What are the traits of an ideal ED reseller? Should ED suppliers shun certain types of resellers? Conversely, should certain types of resellers stay away from ED arrangements? How these questions get answered will help us more richly understand the salient issues related to the initiation and formation of ED relationships. (Mkt RA)

Given the argument of this paper, however, it is perhaps worth pausing to consider whether such ‘genu-

ine’ questions are entirely innocent of rhetorical intent. Identifying issues for further study and pointing

to new areas of research does not leave the state of knowledge unchanged. The writer has identified him

or herself as the identifier of the problem and the author of new questions. Should we see this as a subtle

staking out of a claim for priority and a promotion for a forthcoming paper?

Conclusions

I have argued that academic writing presupposes the active role of readers, and that the engagement of

audience is an important constitutive element of both a writer’s argument and of a disciplinary and ge-

neric context. Questions play an important role in this by explicitly introducing readers as participants in

a dialogue: claiming solidarity and acknowledging alternative views, but most importantly inviting read-

22

ers to engage with the argument. Readers are asked to play a part in the unfolding text by responding to

the writer and entering a forum where they can be led to a preferred viewpoint.

We have also seen that because questions help control the level of personality in a text they are distrib-

uted differently in different contexts. Effective texts must appeal to shared participant expectations and

questions are one way of signalling these. They represent authorial attempts to construct readers by mark-

ing assumptions about the needs, rhetorical preferences, attitudes, status and knowledge of this audience.

Questions reveal judgements about the understandings participants bring to a text: understandings of

what it is relevant and important to ask, of what might be considered problematic, of how writers and

readers routinely interact, and of appropriate ways of structuring information. As a result, questions are

found more in soft disciplines, where acceptance of claims depends more on the construction of an elabo-

rate discursive framework, and in textbooks, where writers are able to confidently assume a stance of un-

disguised authority in relation to their readers. The fact that research writers tended to employ questions

argumentatively to evaluate positions and support their claims, while students mainly saw them as a

means of structuring their discourse reflects clear differences in the ways participants regard interaction

in institutional genres.

Finally, the study of questions also has relevance for instruction, suggesting that students might benefit

from a critical awareness of how expert writers seek to engage readers and manoeuvre them into agree-

ment. Common conversational uses do not adequately prepare novices for the ways questions work in

academic genres to establish a particular relationship, draw readers into an argument and manage their

understanding of an issue. To understand written texts as the acting out of a dialogue offers teachers a

means of demystifying academic discourse for students and of revealing how apparently familiar features

of interaction are used for rhetorical intent. By seeing questions this way, learners may gain greater un-

derstanding of academic discourses and more confidently meet the challenges of participating in their

disciplines.

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Appendix: Research Article Corpus

Cell Biology (Bio) Journal of Cell Biology Mycological Research The Plant Cell Plant Molecular Biology Plant, Cell and Environment Molecular and Cellular Biology Mycologia The New Phytologists Canadian Journal of Botany Plant Physiology Electrical Engineering (EE) Int Journal of Microwave and Millimeter-Wave

CAE Microsystem Technologies IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and

Techniques Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems Solid-State electronics Microelectronics Journal Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Process-

ing Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineer-

ing Int'l Journal of Production Research Int'l Journal of Industrial Engineering Mechnical Engineering (ME) Mechanism and Machine Theory Energy Sources Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering Mechanics and Material Engineering Journal of Engineering Manufacture Int. J. of Mechanical Sciences Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science Energy Engineering Int'l Journal of Energy Research Journal of Energy Resources Technology Applied Linguistics (AL) Applied Linguistics TESOL Quarterly Second Language Research System English for Specific Purpose World Englishes Journal of Second Language Writing Journal of Pragmatics Written Communication International Journal of Applied Linguistics

Marketing (Mkt) Journal of Marketing Management International Journal of Research in Marketing Journal of Marketing Research Journal of Marketing Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Journal of Marketing Communication Journal of International Consumer Marketing Journal of Consumer Research Journal of Retailing Marketing Science Philosophy (Phil) Mind The Journal of Philosophy Analysis The Philosophical Quarterly Philosophy Erkenntnis Inquiry Political Theory Ethics Philosophy and Public Affairs Sociology (Soc) American Journal of Sociology The Sociological Review Current Sociology International Journal of Comparative Sociology Sociology International Sociology British Journal of Sociology British Journal of Criminology Criminology International Journal of the Sociology of Law Physics (Phy) Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Bulletin of Magnetic Resonance Applied Magnetic Resonance Electromagnetics Journal of Magnetic Resonance (B) Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and Applica-

tions Journal of Material Science Journal of Applied Physics Physical Review B American Journal of Physics

26