Academic institutions document their rhetoric through the written communications that show up in faculty mailboxes. Much of what arrives serves to remind faculty of what needs to be done to participate in the events and decision-making processes of the institution. The mail encountered by graduate students also reflects hierarchical power inherent…

Whereas former research on academic discourse has paid a great deal of attention to writing and its hedging strategies, this paper aims to show that a complementary and equally important feature of academic spoken discourse is the use of modal certainty. An examination of modal selections in two American Dissertation Defenses additionally reveals…

For one instructor, learning that personal response, particularly emotions, had no place in the construction of a public self began in high school senior English class where students learned to never use personal pronouns in their writing. The lesson continued in college where she majored in journalism and literature under the direction of…