Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

2 Dialogicality in academic written discourse
Texts can be defined in agreement with Hoey (2001) as “the visible evidence 
of a reasonably self-contained purposeful interaction between one or more 
writers and one or more readers, in which the writer(s) control the interaction 
and produce most of (characteristically all) the language” (ibid.: 11). This is in 
accordance with Bakhtin’s view (1986) that writing is always an ongoing dialogue 
between the writer and the reader(s). While producing written texts authors tend 
to “draw on and incorporate ideas and forms from [their] past experiences of 
texts” (Hyland 2004: 80). Accordingly, texts in general and academic texts in 
particular are inevitably dialogical in the sense that any utterance is a link in a 
very complexly organized chain of other utterances with which it enters into one 
relation or another, but different texts of course differ in the degree of what can 

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be called ‘dialogization’ (Bakhtin, as quoted in Fairclough 2003: 42) which a