ABSTRACT
Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view towards 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, this has been a topic of interest to researchers. Two related ideas have been particularly influential in conceptions of stance: evidentiality and affect. Affect is used ‘to include feelings, moods, dispositions, and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations’. Successful academic writing depends on the individual writer projecting a personal assessment of research entities and claims, although this needs to be done within a shared professional context. Self-mention is probably the most studied feature of stance in academic writing. The chapter traces how the expression of authorial stance has changed in research writing over the past 50 years, uncovering a surprising picture.
