Directives: Argument and Engagement in Academic Writing

Successful academic writing involves both clear exposition and appropriate audience relationships, but the use of directives potentially undermines the harmony of such relationships. Because they instruct the reader to perform an action or to see things in a way determined by the writer, directives are potentially risky devices which are often regarded as bald-on-record threats to face (Brown and Levinson 1987). The widespread use of this feature in academic writing however suggests a more complex rhetorical picture. In this paper I explore the use of directives through an analysis of a 2.5 million word corpus of published articles, textbooks, and L2 student essays, and through interviews with insider informants on their perceptions and practices. The study reveals that directives are used for very different strategic purposes and indicates considerable variations in the ways they are employed across genres and disciplines. The weight of imposition carried by directives crucially depends on these purposes and participants' perceptions of rhetorical context.