Interaction in academic writing: Learning to argue with the reader

The view of written texts as embodying interaction between the writer and r eader is now well established, and underlies many aspects that may be focus ed on in the training of novice writers of academic text. In this paper, I argue that interaction can draw on both interactive and interactional resou rces: interactive resources help to guide the reader through the text, whil e interactional resources involve the reader collaboratively in the develop ment of the text. I use the concept of the 'reader-in-the-text' (Thompson a nd Thetela 1995) to explore a central form of interactional resource: the i nclusion in the text of a voice that is intended to be attributable to the reader. I identify a particular set of discourse contexts in which this hap pens-where the writer brings in the reader's view in order to contradict it -and outline the lexico-grammatical features which signal the other voice i n those contexts; and I place these in a broader perspective on written tex t as a stage-managed form of dialogue. The impetus for the study-comes from working with novice writers; and I discuss a number of examples where writ ten drafts were improved by exploiting the interactional resources describe d, and argue for the value of raising students' awareness of these resource s.