“We must conclude that…”: A diachronic study of academic engagement

Engagement is the way that writers explicitly acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text, drawing them in through readermention, personal asides, appeals to shared knowledge, questions and directives. This is a key rhetorical feature of academic writing and has been a topic of interest to applied linguists for over 20 years. Despite this interest, however, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such...