Chris Ash // Academic Writing Extract. ©All Rights Reserved Chris Ash 2016
 Specifically focusing on various ‘public facing’ texts which the university produces, I aim to discover the extent of which these reflect and mimic a discourse of marketisation and commodification. Such a study must draw correlations between various socioeconomic structures and the resulting discursive structures of Universities. This is made possible by situating the investigation in the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Done correctly, As Teo (2007) states, the ‘dialogic relationship between discourse and society can be construed in dialectal terms, in which one supports and is supported by the other’ (P.95).&nbsp;
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 Fairclough (1996) described how the modern university prospectus has been influenced by institutions of Higher Education operating under market conditions. This shift has created ‘dilemmas’ between the types of social identities and relationships that universities want to create with their reader. This creates a heterogeneity in the text, as HE institutions are forced to find a balance between ‘telling’ and ‘selling’ in their discourse.&nbsp;
The Undergraduate History prospectus presents a range of speech acts which emphasise this transition from selling to telling. Section A of the text begins in an extremely informal manner, three interrogative sentences set the scene for potential students. It then continues by engaging students by presenting them as actors of the sentence, and specifically those ‘who want to shine a light into the dark and intriguing corners of history’. This informal, metaphoric description of the course feels conversational and the second person pronoun ‘you’ which begins the next sentence reiterates this. The interrogative subheading for section B ‘Why choose this course’ also appropriates the voice of the student. What follows is a list of reasons for choosing the course, it is selling the course by telling the reader about its assets. In section C of prospectus the university attempts to emphasise this point by showing how the quality of the teaching is recognised by an external source. This is expressed grammatically, with ‘our department’ being made into the goal of the sentence, whilst the actor becomes the ‘Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education’. By using an external source to validate the quality of the course, the market value of the University begins to increase. As Mayr (2008) suggests, this testifies ‘how serious the university is about its customer-focused approach to students’ (P.32)&nbsp;

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