A Contrastive Study On Writer-reader Interaction In Novices’ And Experts’ Academic Abstract Writing-an Appraisal Approach

Abstract summarizes and miniatures the whole paper. It is not only a kind ofinformation-provider, but also a way for abstract writers to highlight their most centralclaims, and/or to gain readers‘interest and acceptance. The past decades havewitnessed the increasing researches on the academic abstract from interpersonalperspectives.The present study attempts to investigate the construction of the writer-readerinteraction in novice‘s and experts‘academic abstract writings in the light ofAppraisal Theory. Evaluation which is examined as one the most important realizationof W-R (writer-reader) interaction in academic research article is statisticallyinvestigated.Two databases are used in present study: Abstracts by Experts (ABE) andAbstracts by Novices (ABN). ABE consists100abstracts which are randomlyselected from the core international linguistics journals; ABN consists of100abstractswhich are randomly selected from a collection of graduation dissertations written bygraduates in the South China University of Technology. What‘s more, a statisticalanalysis is carried out with the help of UAM Corpus Tool and SPSS to explore thedistribution of Appraisal resources in ABE and ABN. Then, how W-R interaction isconstrued with those Appraisal resources is examined and discussed in detail.Our analysis demonstrates that expert writers and student writers share somesimilarities in constructing writer-reader interaction. Within Attitude, both experts andstudents prefer to encode Appreciation resources; Within Engagement, Contractionresources are preferred both by expert writers and novice writers; Within Graduation,Up-graded evaluation resources win the favor both from expert writers and novicewriters. Nevertheless, differences are more prominent. Novice writers are found, ininteraction with the reader, tend to conduct a Topic-oriented evaluation, while expertwriters prefer to Research-oriented evaluation.The present study may offer some implications for abstracts writing, helpingnovices to write academic abstracts accepted in academia.