Conceptualisations of criticality, evidence and impersonality and academic writing in nursing and midwifery

This paper examines how attributes such as criticality, evidence and impersonality are conceptualised in nursing and midwifery and the role these conceptualisations play in discipline-specific academic writing. In this paper attributes are taken to mean existing or desired features of disciplinary texts. The paper draws on data from a two-year study on academic writing in these disciplines which looked at the nature and dynamics of discipline-specific academic writing in two undergraduate programmes at a UK university. The paper aims to contribute to recent theoretical and pedagogic debates on the specificity of writing in the disciplines. It argues that in attending to the significant relationship between context-sensitive attributes and disciplinary academic writing important perspectives can be gained