Assess graduate students' understanding of hedging and stance markers in academic research articles by requiring identification of common lexical and grammatical devices (e.g., modal verbs, epistemic verbs, adverbs, approximators, boosters), analysis of their pragmatic functions (mitigation, epistemic positioning, authorial stance), evaluation of disciplinary and rhetorical variation (Introduction vs. Discussion, citation practices), and explanation of how these choices influence claim strength and reader interpretation; tasks include short excerpt analyses, categorization, and justification of alternative phrasing.