Explores different ways that organizational moves and other discourse elements such as hedging are reflected in graduate student research abstracts for theses, dissertations and research articles. Master's thesis abstracts from five disciplines at California State University, San Bernardino were analyzed. Rhetorical conventions in these texts that reflect the epistemological and social expectations of the writers' academic communities were explored. Results indicate that these abstracts use a variety of hedging patterns and many of the moves that have been described for published research articles.