Novice writers often wonder how much they should reveal their own identity in writing a scholarly article, for instance, whether it is appropriate to use I or not. Writing handbooks and manuals sometimes give unhelpful advice such as ‘Don’t use first personal pronouns in academic writing’or ‘Use passive voice instead of active voice’. Such advice can be misleading and overgeneralised as styles may vary greatly across disciplines or, as demonstrated later in this chapter, across moves. Styles may also vary across genres such as the abstract or the introduction. As pointed out by Bunton (2002), an introduction to a graduate thesis has a different style from an introduction to an article to be published in a scholarly journal. That non-native speaking scholars experience problems not only with the structure of the article but also in expressing authorial stance or voice has been documented in the literature (eg Flowerdew, 1999).‘Authorial stance’or ‘voice’as used in the present study refers to the writer’s identity (ie whether the writer shows his/her presence explicitly or implicitly in the text), as well as the writer’s expression of attitudes, feelings or judgments about a proposition or entity in the text. There have been a considerable number of studies on the abstract genre and the research article genre. Most of the research on the abstract tends to focus more on rhetorical structure than on interpersonal aspects (eg Anderson & Maclean, 1997; Busch-Lauer, 1995a, 1995b; Lorés, 2004; Santos, 1996). Some of the more recent studies, however, do address