ABSTRACT
Writing plays an important role in the construction and evaluation of knowledge in academia. Academia offers a rich environment to study discourse communities. This chapter examines student writing from a corpus-based English for Academic Purposes (EAP) perspective. It reports on a study of meta-discursive strategies used by undergraduate student writers in biology and philosophy. The EAP iterations of discourse analysis are heavily influenced by Swales and other genre-based approaches. Successful undergraduate writing is marked by the student being able to make persuasive arguments. As students navigate disciplinary and generic conventions, the strategies for what counts as persuasive will differ. The chapter concludes with future directions that corpus-based discourse studies can continue to examine student writing.
