Academic Evaluation: Review Genres in University Settings

Academic criticism can be highly fraught and face threatening, potentially wounding to the reviewed author and disruptive to the discipline, but it occurs routinely in review genres. This book explores how academics publically evaluate each others’ work. Focusing on blurbs, book reviews, review articles, and literature reviews, the international contributors to the volume show how writers manage to critically engage with others’ ideas, argue their own viewpoints, and establish academic credibility while simultaneously navigating these risky interactions. The book comprises twelve chapters written by experts from eight countries and addresses the following topics:· the role of evaluation and argument in reviews· interpersonal aspects of review discourses· the connections of evaluation to disciplinary cultures and language· the expression of evaluation in different languages· diachronic change in review discourses · the role of power and interest in academic reviews· evaluation of discourse approaches to either student needs