Points of focus and position: Intertextual reference in PhD theses

This paper investigates the nature of texts produced for assessment at the highest level of advanced academic literacy: PhD theses. Eight theses from within a single department (Agricultural Botany) at a British university are the subject of study, and the contexts in which these texts were written are investigated through interviews with the supervisors. The notion of a genre of the PhD thesis is problematized and it is argued that a genre-analytic approach can be highly generative. Finally, the ways that the writers manipulate focus and position within their texts is explored through an investigation of citation practices in the theses.