Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the concept of writer’s visibility inspired by approaches to the analysis of identity in written discourse (see Ivanič 1998, Charles 1999 and John 2005). The way medical academic writers self-represent themselves in their research articles can be seen in terms of a gradable visibility cline crafted and constrained by the academic genre expectations of these texts (Swales and Feak 2004; Stock and Eik-Nes 2016). Traditionally, authorial visibility has been studied within frameworks such as evaluation , authorial voice and stance . Still, there is no framework as yet been proposed that binds together possible textual realisations that can be considered as visibility features in academic written texts. This paper conducts a study of 40 medical research articles that reveal different manifestations of the authors’ presence. A cline is proposed that encompasses different lexico-grammatical realisa tions such as self-mentions, passive constructions and non-animated subjects followed by active verbs. These features can be interpreted as authorial voice realisations that allow us to measure or grade writers’ visibility and its rhetorical implication in the text. Abstract rhetors presented the lowest frequency (327 tokens) yet, they directly were interpreted as Med-RAs results and products. Contrastive studies dealing with (im)personality and (de)personalisation processes have been conducted in RAs and in scientific dissemination articles by Ciapuscio (2003), Ferrari and Gallardo (1999), Gil-Salom (2000) or Martínez (2001). They suggest that nominalisations and, more specifically, abstract rhetors are kept in the resulting scientific dissemination articles or popularizations to maintain the reader’s trust in the research process. The representation of the different visibility which Med-RAs