All writers use a variety of strategies when presenting their views in relation to their sources. These tactics help to position their arguments and offer claims. But they also help to clarify where their ideas come from, what research they’ve done, and where they stand regarding the sources they’ve gathered.
Academic writing involves a lot more than simply agreeing or disagreeing with a source. This post breaks down the various moves writers make with sources and why they’re important.
Establishing Context & Announcing a Project
Most research papers announce their goals and context early on, ideally in the first paragraph. They explain up front what questions they seek to answer, and why readers should care. Writing scholar Joseph Harris describes the move of establishing context as “coming to terms.” When writers come to terms, they explain their stance but also the wider issue and its importance for readers. Gerald Graff describes this move as answering the “So what?” question. You should always assume that readers will need some explanation as to why they should care about issues that seem important to you.
All writers have a larger goal or project they want to accomplish. They either want to share important information, alter perspectives, correct an assumption, or motivate readers to take action. You might think of your project as a stronger version of a thesis. It lays out your main argument, but also what you want to accomplish through arguing that thesis and why it matters.
Christopher Greenwell and his colleagues announce their project on women’s sexualization in combat sports, explaining its importance to advertisers in the industry. In their view, promoters and advertisers devote too much attention to female fighters’ physical attractiveness, in ways that diminish the sport itself and trivialize the fighters’ accomplishments. In their introduction, they identify a research gap, and state their own goal to help find better ways to market professional female fighters:
As current research does not adequately address how different representations of women in violent sport may affect how the athletes and the events in which they compete are viewed, there is a need for additional research to understand the best ways to market female athletes in combat sport. Therefore, this study seeks to understand how sport consumers view women competing in violent sport and how different presentations affect consumers’ attitudes. From a practical perspective, results from this study should help the marketing efforts of those promoting women participating in sports, which defy traditional gender roles.
The full importance of your own study may not become clear until you’ve done your research and drafted your paper. But asking yourself the “so what?” question throughout your process will result in a more coherent project. During the final stages of writing, you’ll want to make these kinds of moves in your opening. Making your intentions known up front increases the chances that readers will understand your argument and find value in your paper. Also, knowing that you’ll need to articulate your contributions will guide your research and drafting process.
Synthesizing Sources
Most articles have a literature review section that discusses studies published on a given topic. This section does more than simply summarize everything available on a topic. The most effective research writers present a narrative about how current approaches on a topic have evolved over a period of time. They also describe the various positions, including major areas of consensus and disagreement between other researchers or schools of thought. Finally, they may also identify gaps or frontiers, in order to clear a path for their own intervention.
A research article on Facebook profile pictures by Amir Hetsroni and Dror Guldin overviews major studies on social media use that are relevant to their own project. Here, you’ll see the moves they use to align their sources. Also note how quickly they cover existing research by using indirect citations:
Some researchers have claimed that Facebook users have a tendency to stretch the truth to present socially desirable identities (Siibak, 2009; Yurchisin, Watchravesringkan, & McCabe, 2005). The practices used to establish such a desired persona are more often implicit (e.g., uploading pictures showing the users engaged in certain social activities, and refraining from uploading pictures shot in other settings) and less frequently explicit (e.g., articulating a clear narrative in the “About Me” section of their profile). However, the opposing view has been presented in studies published in the 2010s, whereby an extended real-life presentation aimed at creating a credible image is the more prevalent norm of self-presentation on Facebook (Back et al., 2010). Thus, for instance, users tend to refrain from posting a picture of someone else as a profile picture (Hum et al., 2011). Researchers have also shown that people’s motives for using Facebook vary considerably and include, inter alia, keeping in touch with friends, making new contacts (both for romantic purposes and for nonromantic friendship), reconnecting with lost contacts (Joinson, 2008), promoting business (Kwok & Yu, 2013), political affiliation (Vitak et al., 2011), and studying (Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang, & Liu, 2012). The multipurpose usage of Facebook leads to practices of self-presentation that differ from those employed on dating websites or for commercial homepages, where the variety of social contexts is narrower (Zhao et al., 2008).
This passage breaks down into three major moves. First, the authors review patterns that some researchers have found in how Facebook users manipulate their profiles by choosing what photos they upload. Second, they introduce an alternative stance arguing that users care more about credibility than social desirability. Third, they quickly summarize several studies that explore a range of motivations for Facebook use.
Forwarding & Key Concepts
You’ll likely encounter new theories, terminology, or concepts in your research. These are the major frameworks you’ll apply to your argument, and they’ll help you interpret and explain your evidence. Your readers may not know these theories, or they might understand them differently than you do. It helps to establish key terms and ideas up front and describe them. The literature review section becomes a good place to establish these ideas and show their importance.
Your sources can also do much more than simply provide information and viewpoints. Some important works provide an entirely different lens or framework to think about a problem. An author might create a new theory to explain a concept or event in their own discipline. They might not be writing about your issue directly. Nonetheless, you find their new way of thinking potentially helpful to a topic you’re researching.
Angela Tenga and Jonathan Basset practice forwarding in their article, “‘You kill or you die, or you die and you kill’: Meaning and Violence in AMC’s The Walking Dead.” The authors explore the popular thriller through the lens of Terror Management Theory (TMT), building on the work of Pyszczynski, Greenerg, and Solomon. In short, TMT refers to a range of social and psychological strategies used by individuals and collectives to survive when faced with dangerous, life-threatening situations that are prolonged or inescapable.
As Tenga and Basset write, “Terror Management Theory seems particularly applicable to the behavior of the characters in The Walking Dead, who live with the relentless threat of impending death” while also serving as a “useful critical lens for studying the cultural role of zombie fiction” (2016). By drawing on this set of theories, the authors offer a new way of understanding the show and its intense popularity.
Christopher Greenwell and his colleagues also introduce and explain a key concept in their exploration of women’s sexualization in combat sports, discussed earlier. They describe a concept known as the “match-up hypothesis,” and explain its meaning and relevance to their project. As they write,
The match-up hypothesis provides insight into how consumers may perceive athletes promoting an event. The match-up hypothesis, which lies in advertising research, suggests that in order for advertisements to be effective, the message conveyed by the celebrity endorser and the product must converge or match up (Kamins, 1990). The theory links the relationship between the endorser –brand fit and endorser credibility while explaining how the image of a spokesperson affects attitudes toward brands and advertisements (Koernig & Boyd, 2009). If the product advertised increases attractiveness and the person in the advertisement is attractive, congruency is present.
Writers frequently build on the theories and frameworks of other scholars. They expand them with new findings, or they adapt them to new circumstances. This strategy of forwarding is essential to the advancement of knowledge. For example, sociologists and criminologists have recently begun adapting ideas from medical disciplines in order to rethink gun violence as an infectious disease. You can make use of this strategy in your own research writing.
Disagreement, Partial Agreement, & Countering
Writers don’t always agree or disagree with their sources 100 percent. They often side with some specific claims, and against others. Furthermore, they can partially agree with a claim but still find exceptions to it, situations in which a commonly held view doesn’t make sense. For example, Alisa C. Roost practices partial agreement in her article, “Losing It: The Construction and Stigmatization of Obesity on Reality Television in the United States”:
In April 2012, First Lady Michelle Obama appeared on the popular reality television show The Biggest Loser (TBL) and praised it for motivating viewers: “I am a big fan of The Biggest Loser because the contestants inspire so many of us” (season 13: ep.15). The contestants do indeed inspire many people. The United States, like much of the world, focuses considerable attention on obesity, and there is indeed value to bringing consciousness to healthy choices. However, an extremely destructive perversion of this movement has emerged: a shaming judgment of the overweight or obese as morally inferior that is repeated in countless articles, headlines, and stories.
Here, Roost agrees with views like those expressed by Michelle Obama that people who try to improve their diet may inspire others to do the same, stating that “there is indeed value to bringing consciousness to healthy choices.” However, she disagrees with many premises behind reality shows and takes issue with the ways the present health and body image. This partial agreement drives her larger argument about these shows.
Qualification
When we point out exceptions and complications to opinions we agree with, we narrow our claims. Writing specialists describe this act as qualification, and it helps to strengthen our claims by clarifying when they’re relevant and when not. You can qualify your own arguments, but you can also do it with your sources.
Specific words can help with qualification, called hedging words. They’re meant to give readers a heads up that an argument doesn’t always apply to every circumstance. Using these helps give your writing a tone of self-awareness and thoughtfulness. You may have been taught not to use these words, but they’re appropriate when you truly need to qualify a claim. For example:
- In some cases, …
- Usually, …
- Most of the time…
- In certain circumstances, …
- In large part…
- Individual words and pairs: might, could, possibly, largely, not necessarily, almost certainly
We see such qualification often in academic and other forms of writing. Roost uses them frequently in her article on reality TV shows. She writes that “these shows reflect and reinforce a narrative that, for the vast majority, is unattainable and creates a cycle of shame, isolation, and failure.” By qualifying her claim with the phrase “for the vast majority,” she maintains that the shows may not have the same negative effect on absolutely everyone.
Metadiscourse & Signposting
Writers frequently announce their purpose at the beginning of an article, but they also restate those intentions throughout. Sometimes they also clarify what they aren’t trying to do. It may seem unnecessary, but this strategy helps researchers clarify their goals and avoid misinterpretation.
Many research articles are broken up into sections where researchers try to accomplish different goals–either revealing a gap in research, explaining their methods, reporting data, or analyzing findings. The beginnings and endings of these sections usually contain signposting, or statements that explicitly define or summarize the goals of each section. For example, the authors of the Facebook profile picture study summarize their goals in the article’s conclusion. However, it could easily be re-written and fit into other sections:
Our aim is to identify, by demographics and relationship status, Facebook users who choose to expose their physique to the world on this platform. This is done not just to satisfy statistical curiosity, but also because the sociodemographic profile of SNS users can influence the pictures they choose to upload (Oberst, Renau, Chamarro, & Carbonell, 2016), and these pictures can indicate motives for using SNS (Ong et al., 2011; Siibak, 2009).
This kind of metadiscourse and signposting occurs so often because academic articles are long and complex. Signposting helps to remind readers of a study’s significance, especially after reporting a great amount of data. It also helps writers themselves stay focused on their goals, and avoid getting lost in the details. In this way, metadiscourse strategies help tie evidence and interpretations back to their main claims and arguments. The result is a cohesive reading experience that results in a sense of completion.
The strategies described in this post will help you organize your sources, and situate your own views in relation to them. Below, you’ll find a list of examples for each strategy. These template statements are taken directly from academic journal articles. They represent the exact phrasing used by writers to accomplish moves like synthesis, forwarding, disagreement, qualification, and signposting. You don’t need to worry about plagiarism in this case, because phrasings occur hundreds of times in different articles and are used by almost every researcher. They’re similar to common sayings in everyday conversation. Think of them as a kind of shorthand used to organize complex discourse. Feel free to take these patterns and make them your own.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it will give you a solid foothold into understanding the basic moves of academic discourse. From here, you should pay attention to and keep note of these types of moves when you see them in other research articles. Over time, you’ll become familiar with these moves and develop your own repertoire. They’ll become a natural and central part of your academic writing.
The University of Manchester also maintains an extensive bank of templates for different moves and strategies in academic discourse. Their resources cover the basic tactics described here, as well as many other sub-types and categories. You can also purchase a copy of John Morley’s book version on Amazon for under $10.
Synthesis Templates
| Introducing Debates and Trends |
| One of the primary debates within scholarship on X has been… |
| While some studies show that X, others find that Y… |
| Findings on Topic X have been mixed. |
| A number of scholars have undertaken analysis of X… |
| Scholarly approaches to X attend to the ways in which Y… |
| These feelings reflect what Scholar X describes as Y… |
| There have been a number of studies on Topic X. |
| Over the years, scholars have identified a wide array of X… |
| This issue has been well documented, with research finding that… |
| This research has led to calls for X… |
| Most recently, Scholar X’s work on Y shows how Z… |
| Scholars’ interests in the relationship between X and Y can be traced back to… |
| The literature on Topic X would suggest that… |
| The perspective on X argues that… |
| In the literature on Topic X, this is often referred to as… |
| X data can be divided into three categories… |
| Showing a Trend or Chain of Thought |
| Scholar X’s analysis of Y develops Scholar Z’s approach… |
| Scholar X’s theorization of the role that X plays in Y draws heavily on Scholar Z’s idea that… |
| Identifying Gaps and Weaknesses in Current Scholarship |
| The amount of scholarship stemming from the philosophical position that X is legion, but there remains a divide in scholarship between Y and Z views that… |
| The value system ensuing from assumptions about X still frame ideas about Y… |
| Qualitative studies that explore X have found that Y would not be sufficient… |
| As current research does not adequately address… |
| There is a need for additional research to understand… |
| These debates leave us with a need for a more nuanced definition of… |
| The value system ensuing from assumptions about X still frame ideas about Y… |
| The assumption that X is common to most academic papers on the subject, including Y… |
| Adapting Current Research |
| Based on X approaches, we can utilize Y to accomplish Z. |
| The analysis of X is framed by critical literature on Y…
Recently, researchers have started to make use of X for Y purpose. |
Disagreement Templates
| Common Phrases |
| At the same time, Nonetheless, However, Of course, On the other hand, That said, This point aside… |
| Countering Common Views |
| Although X, there is Y… |
| While X, Y shows/exhibits/demonstrates… |
| Despite X, Y… |
| This information challenges the idea that… |
| Nonetheless, a major limitation of X is that… |
| It is difficult or nearly impossible to assert that… |
| It is often reasoned that X, but some research shows instead that… |
| On the surface it appears that X, but in fact Y. |
| At first glance X. However, Y… |
| It stands to reason that X, and yet Y. |
| Traditionally, researchers have assumed that X. However, Y… |
| Unwavering enthusiasm for X leads to the entirely understandable, but erroneous, conclusion that Y. |
| The original evidence for X was fairly thin… |
| This result contradicts other research that X, showing that Y instead… |
| Disagreeing with Specific Sources |
| Scholar X’s theory offers more certainty to the idea that Y, but suffers from Problem Z… |
| Thus with essentially no original evidence to suppor their view, and some evidence directly contrary to it, scholars came up with an entirely new view that… |
| On Author’s point X, I part company… |
| Author X does not mention/fails to mention/neglects to mention… |
| While I embrace Author X’s point/policy/conclusion, I think that… |
Metadiscourse & Signposting Templates
| Announcing Intentions |
| In this article, I approach Topic X from the lens of… |
| It is my intention here to emphasize the importance of… |
| The central concern of this article is to look at… |
| This paper examines… |
| Part I of this article explores why… |
| Part II of this article investigates how… |
| This paper addresses… |
| My contention is that… |
| Our aim is to identify… |
| As discussed above… |
| This was done not just for X Purpose, but also Y… |
| As I have argued… |
| Anticipating Misinterpretations |
| Topic X is not my primary focus in this paper. However, I am arguing that Y… |