ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how interaction has changed, looks at stance and engagement to ask whether academic texts are becoming more interactional and if so in what ways and what fields. Interaction in academic writing is the ways writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their claims with readers. The decline in the use of interactive features turns out to be unevenly distributed across fields, suggesting how individual disciplines are slowly modifying their writing conventions. Writers in the hard disciplines have tended to downplay interactional positions, which result in a less reader-inclusive rhetoric placing greater stress on the impartiality of science. The chapter explores writers’ use of interaction using a model which sees writers as taking a stance to convey their attitudes and credibility and engaging readers by explicitly bringing them into the discourse.
