One key means of negotiating entry into a particular discourse in a research community is via the problem statement section in both research articles and dissertations/theses. Students are mostly confronted with the challenge of establishing a research space. This paper investigates the rhetorical strategies employed by Language students in the Department of English, University of Cape Coast, to establish a niche in their introduction sections. A total of fifty-two introductions were collected from both undergraduate dissertations and postgraduate theses. The data was subjected to a qualitative content analysis. The results of the analysis indicated that both undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) students employed Indicating a Gap as their best choice to establish a niche, with the PGs using it more than the UGs. Both groups of students used Establishing Problem and Need as their next preferred option to create a research space. However, it was only the PGs who used Counter-claiming as the third strategy. These findings of this study have implications for the scholarship on students’ academic writing and pedagogy.

Since titles are gateways to the heart of research articles (RAs), their organisational structure should be regarded very crucial in appealing to the potential reader. This study aimed to investigate how titles of RAs are presented in three disciplines (Gynaecology/Obstetrics, Business, and Law). After a thorough study of 574 titles, the study revealed that Business titles were averagely longer than those in the other two disciplines. In terms of title style, it was revealed that the Single Unit Title was extensively used in Gynaecology/Obstetrics and Law, while the Compound Unit Title dominated the Business titles. Syntactically, Noun Phrases extremely dominated the Single Unit Titles across the three domains. Detailed examination of the NP modifications showed that nominal titles which were both Pre and Post-modified were highly frequent in all the disciplines, which contrasts what is in the literature. The study also identified the Prepositional Phrase as the commonest structure used in post-modifying the nominal structures than using non-finite clauses in all the disciplines. Again, colon was the most predominant punctuation mark used in partitioning the Compound Unit Titles across the three disciplines, with Law recording the highest followed by Gynaecology/Obstetrics and Business. Lastly, the data exhibited high frequency of Domain-Specific words in the titles more than Research-Based words across the disciplines. This study provides useful information on the nature of effective RA titles to novice writers and advanced authors. It also informs the teaching of academic writing skills.

Following Swales' (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners' writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study, thus, investigates the syntactic structures employed by authors of conference paper titles (CPTs) in Applied Linguistics. A qualitative content analysis was employed to study a corpus of 592 CPTs from a popular conference for researchers, scholars, and practitioners of Applied Linguistics worldwide, supported by some descriptive statistics. The analysis of the data of the study identified three main title styles: Single Unit Title, Compound Unit Title, and Complex Unit Title. The analysis showed that, out of these three title styles, Compound Unit Titles were preferred by researchers. Further, the colon was the dominantly used punctuation mark in separating the components of Compound Unit titles. The final point was that authors preferred prepositional phrases in the post modification of the noun phrase structure of CPTs. The findings of this study have implications for the scholarship on titlelogy, academic writing pedagogy as well as further research.