hedging in academic writing

hedging in academic writing

The Importance of Hedging in Academic Writing

1. Introduction to Hedging

It is important to describe the function of “hedging” in academic writing, or in research terms and in an academic context, as with many linguistic items, its functions are more clearly seen in certain contexts. Put simply, hedging means creating a “hedge” around what you are saying, to show that you are aware that things are not as straightforward as perhaps you have indicated. This can be because you cannot be absolutely sure of what you are saying, for example in predicting the future or assessing what other people are doing or thinking. And it can also be because you know your audience may have different views about the issue, so you want to make it clear that you are not being dogmatic or closing off other possible lines of thought. Because those lines of thought are not the same as the facts you are discussing, they can often best be identified by use of modal verbs and similar expressions, which can thus constitute a type of hedging. In the following examples, taken from a Geography student’s dissertation, we can see how the writer uses modal auxiliaries to express varying degrees of certainty, and how this reflects the crucial activity of hedging.

2. Benefits of Using Hedging in Academic Writing

Hedging occupies a central place in academic writing for two reasons. First, writers are concerned to establish the truth of their claims: hedging allows them to protect themselves against the possibility of their predictions and interpretations being proved false. Secondly, academics are themselves divided about the level of certainty to aspire to in their writing: on the one hand, they need to convey the impression that they are confident about their claims since their own authority is a factor in persuading their readers. On the other hand, they recognize that an overconfident stance is often less scientifically respectable. Runge (2001) puts it this way: the various positions taken in the use of modals reflect the intuitive understanding that in an uncertain world, certainty is also a variable thing. So, hedging language is a means to negotiate between multiple conflicting considerations. The University of California’s overview of the concept and consideration of certainty and modality in natural language is an illuminating parallel to this on a larger scale.

3. Strategies for Effective Hedging

Hyland states the next pre-item selection strategy to be hedging around the item and its involvement of the use of a substitute item that carries less commitment and the use of qualifiers and boosters. While using a term which has a particularly commitment, the writer can use a substitute word which may have similar denotation but less connotation. This was accounted for by Hyland’s study of scientific papers in finding that the most common hedging device was the use of such substitute words.

As questions are rhetorically the most effective means for getting a message across and the negation of a sentence usually carries the same illocutionary force as the positive sentence negated, they are often less succinct ways of achieving a commitment level that could have been expressed with direct assertions. However, it must be noted that both the use of questions and negation can become too effective. This is because these are means of avoiding commitment altogether and for questions, each can be answered in a number of ways, so in both cases it is not clear whether the intended commitment is to one answer.

One of the pre-selection strategies include the use of a less direct speech act and the writer can employ various devices such as questions, negatives and passives and use of a more tentative illocutionary verbs to perform the speech act. This is particularly effective as the more tentative question form allows the writer to convey his message with only concomitant commitment while having an escape route in an implied answer, whether in the positive or negative.

Acknowledged that hedging is important in academic writing, researchers have tried to find out the effective strategies that work towards successful hedging. Ideally, effective hedging ensures that writers manifest their attitudes with the right degree of commitment, given the particular contexts of their reading matter by using various strategies that are available to achieve this end. According to Hyland, these strategies can be located at three broad levels i.e. before the lexical item is selected, during the selection of the item and after the choice of the item.

4. Common Mistakes to Avoid in Hedging

“What is evidently happening here is that the student has made a high-level claim concerning the cognitive processes of all editors, but has provided no evidence that this is true in any but the case of the one editor he studied. This is a case of overheding caused by a lack of distinction between propositional and illocutionary meaning, and a subsequent failure to identify the limits of his findings.”

The terms overheding and underheding are to some extent relative, and it is not always straightforward to determine whether particular instances constitute errors. Nonetheless, there are certain cases in which a failure to hedge seems to be so inappropriate as to strongly suggest a lack of awareness of the necessity of hedging, and these constitute clear instances of unterheding. An example of this can be found in the data presented in and, taken from a case study written by a masters student in language and linguistics. The student is discussing the ways in which various editors evaluated their own attitudes to correctness as a guide to their corrective decision-making, and makes the following assertion:

Using data taken from a small corpus of Filipino masters students’ dissertation writing, this paper will identify some of the more common types of errors made in the use of hedges, with special reference to the phenomena of overheding and unterhedging.

Praised as a highly effective method of both “indicating a degree of commitment to the validity of our claims” and of “negotiating interpersonal meanings”, many are the reasons why ESL/EFL writers are encouraged to “hedge” their claims in academic writing. Nonetheless, as many students of EAP have discovered, learning to hedge proficiently is no simple task, and it is all too easy to commit various errors in the process; in fact, the very students who need to use hedges most are often the ones who do so the least effectively.

5. Conclusion and Final Thoughts on Hedging

The most direct way to show the strength of our beliefs is to make strong assertions. However, this is appropriate only when a claim is clearly supported by evidence and reason, as there are often cases in academic writing where we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a strong assertion. In these cases it is better to use a cautious claim which indicates our degree of commitment, and this is where hedging is useful. For example, instead of making a strong assertion, we can say something is likely, or it appears that, or many… are… . Shell nouns are especially useful for hedging. Instead of launching straight into a discussion of a theory or findings which one is not yet willing to assert, the author can give a prelude stating that this is a discussion of the impression of the theory or the importance or contradictions of the findings. Then if the section is unsatisfactory it can be deleted with no loss of face.

Too much hedging can be a sign of weakness or lack of confidence in some writing for academic journals, but for the vast majority of academic writing, hedging is an important means to increase the chance that our claims are interpreted as intended. In academic writing, the audience is well educated and quite critical. They require evidence and good reason before they will accept a claim. However, no matter how strong the evidence or reason, there is always a probability, however small, that we are mistaken. Thus it is useful to distinguish in our writing between fact and inference, to show when we are relying on a strong argument and when we are speculating, and to show the strength of our beliefs about our claims.