Assess students’ ability to analyze and compare metadiscourse, hedging, and epistemic modality in English-language doctoral dissertations across STEM and humanities. Tasks: identify and classify stance vs. engagement markers, lexical and grammatical hedges, and modal expressions; design or interpret small-scale corpus and qualitative coding procedures (annotation scheme, inter-rater reliability, basic statistical comparison); and explain disciplinary patterns and implications for academic writing pedagogy and evaluation.