Crossed Words: criticism in scholarly writing Introduction Françoise Salagier Meyer Beverly A. Lewin The critical act as a pragmatic unit for studying academic conflict: a methodological framework Federico Navarro Hard science hard talk The study of negative comments in physics book reviews Esmat Babaii Dont be stupid about intelligent design : confrontational impoliteness in medical journal editorials Davide Simone Giannoni I felt that the proposal had some promise but was hampered by lack of specificity [...] : personal attribution and mitigation in grant proposals peer review reports Dimitra Koutsantoni Mind the gap: criticism in literary criticism Beverly A. Lewin Hadara Perpignan Who accepts Who rejects The case of a rejected paper in applied linguistics Seyyed Abdolhamid Mirhosseini Expert knowledge holders knowledge builders and factual reporters: critical voices in medical genres Françoise Salager Meyer María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza Scholarly criticism across discourse communities Zofia Golebiowski Academic book reviews of literature in English and Spanish: writers visibility and invisibility strategies for expressing critical comments Ana I. Moreno Fernández Lorena Suárez Wrong or just different How existing knowledge is staged to promote new claims in English economics and linguistics articles Trine Dahl Kjersti Fløttum Establishing a niche in applied linguistics and educational technology research articles Phuong Dzung Pho Simon Musgrave Julie Bradshaw Scholarly criticism in a small academic community: a diachronic study of book reviews in the oldest Serbian scholarly journal Bojana Petrić A diachronic study of music criticism: the case of record reviews Olivia Fong Wa Ha